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HICSS-40
Electric Power Systems Restructuring:
Engineering, Economics
and Policy Track
Chair: Prof. Robert J. Thomas
School of Electrical Engineering
428 Phillips Hall
Cornell University
Ithaca, NY 14853
(607) 255-5083 (office)
(607) 255-8871 (fax)
Complex Interacting Infrastructure Systems (Ian Dobson)
Cyber and Physical Security (Carl Hauser)
Electric Power System Monitoring and Control (Pete Sauer)
Engineering and Economics Interactions (Shmuel Oren)
Complex Interacting Infrastructure Systems
Individual critical infrastructures such as the power transmission network often exhibit characteristic properties of complex systems such as infrequent large failure events. These events, though infrequent, often obey a power law distribution in their probability versus size, which makes them a high risk to society. It is thought that some of this behavior comes from different parts of the systems interacting with each other both in space and time. While these complex infrastructure systems can exhibit these characteristics on their own, in reality these individual infrastructure systems interact with each other in even more complex ways. This interaction can lead to increased or decreased risk of failure in the individual systems. To understand the true risk in a society that is increasingly dependent on these complex interconnected infrastructures one must understand interactions and interdependencies of these complex infrastructure systems. This minitrack is aimed at investigating these interactions and formulating appropriate risk assessment tools for such systems to improve our ability to predict these low frequency, high-risk infrastructure failures and to identify the techniques to mitigate their effects. Papers of interest should cover topics related to interacting interdependent infrastructures.
Ian Dobson
Electrical and Computer Engineering Department
University of Wisconsin-Madison
1415 Engineering Drive
Madison WI 53706 USA
Phone: (608) 262 2661
Email: dobson@engr.wisc.edu
Cyber and Physical Security
Like other parts of the economy, the electric power infrastructure is increasingly dependent on accurate and timely exchange of information for operations and markets. Vulnerabilities in the cyber infrastructure that supports this information exchange create risks for the reliability, efficiency and integrity of the power system. For this session we solicit papers addressing these issues. Topics of interest include, for example: authentication and access control for maintenance; securing wireless communication in substations; securing real-time communications; risk assessment of the coupled cyber, market, and power infrastructures; trust management systems related to power grid operations and markets.
Carl Hauser
School of Electrical Engineering and
Computer Science
Washington State University
Pullman, Washington
Phone: 509-335-6470
Email:
hauser@eecs.wsu.edu
Electric Power System Monitoring and Control
This minitrack will focus on tools and analytical methods to enhance the ability of electric power systems to survive disturbances with minimal impact on performance. Specific topics include: Steady-State and Dynamic Security Assessment; Available Transfer Capability (ATC); State Estimation; Security-Constrained Optimal Power Flow; Sensor Applications; Large-Scale Real-Time Control; and related technologies.
Peter W. Sauer
Dept. of Electrical & Computer Engineering
University of Illinois
1406 W. Green St.
Urbana, IL 61801
Phone: 217-333-0394
Fax: 217-333-1162
Email:
sauer@ece.uiuc.edu
Session Chair: M. Kezunovic
kezunov@ece.tamu.edu
The technology of communications and sensors for power system applications has
tremendously advanced over the last decade. A variety of communication media
such as WiFi, fiber optic, and wide-band power line carrier are becoming widely
used technologies. All kinds of sensors such as optical current and voltage as
well as sensors for non-electrical quantities (temperature, vibration, pressure,
etc) are being deployed by the utilities in many diverse applications. The
challenge now remains to get the communication and sensor networks integrated in
an optimal way to support local and system wide applications that were not
feasible before. The papers
dealing with integration of communication and sensor networks, new sensors, new
communication solutions, as well as the performance evaluation, new
applications, and benefits of the new solutions are of interest to this session.
Session Chair: Joseph H. Eto
jheto@lbl.gov
The North American power grid was built and operated as a vertically integrated system under the control of local utilities. This system has been undergoing significant transformation over the last 50 years with formation of utility control areas, interconnections among neighboring utilities, formation of ISOs/RTOs (independent system operators/regional transmission organizations), and development of regional grids and markets. This mismatch between the growing power system reliability needs and the eroding spare capacity and performance, coupled with the rising impact of outages on the nations vital infrastructures highlight the necessity for redefining the current power system operation and planning practices, and to look towards new tools and technologies to meet the challenges and the needs in this new competitive era.
Time synchronized sub-second monitoring (generically known as, “phasor measurements”) is one of the key promising technologies on the horizon that could help modernize and improve the Nation’s electric delivery system reliability and security, relieve transmission congestion, and address some of the above mentioned problems in system planning and operations. The technology complements existing SCADA systems by providing the high sub-second resolution and global visibility to address the new emerging need for wide area grid monitoring, while continuing to use existing SCADA infrastructure for local monitoring and control.
The papers selected for this session will discuss aspects of the research being conducted on phasor measurements. A discussion of the advanced real-time measurement systems that underlie the measurements, aspects of the collection, analysis, and application of these measurements, including data protocols, communication, and integration, topology processing, state estimation, security margin assessment, alarming, and visualization are also of interest.
Session 3: EMS Applications
Session Chair: Tom Overbye
overbye@ece.uiuc.edu
Restructuring in the electric power industry has led to the creation of large-scale Reliability Coordinators (RCs) with the purpose being better coordination of the security and reliability of the high voltage transmission grid. Furthermore, partially as a result of the August 14th, 2003 blackout, there has recently been an increased desire for better inter-RC coordination in order to provide better situational awareness of the state of the a large portion of the interconnected transmission system. The focus of this session is the energy management system (EMS) applications needed to provide this increased wide-area situational awareness. Desired papers would focus on traditional or new EMS applications with an emphasis on the changes needed to handle such large systems. Example topics include state estimation, contingency analysis, security constrained optimal power full, and wide-area visualization.
Engineering and Economics Interactions
The objective of this minitrack is to explore the technical and economic implications of market design features that have been introduced or proposed in various systems as second best approaches that attempt to recognize the public good nature of operational reliability and supply adequacy. The session will also explore ways to bridge the divide between systems and market operation through means that will reduce out of market actions and uplifted cost.
Shmuel Oren
Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research
University of California at Berkeley
Berkeley, CA
Phone: 510-642-1836
Fax: 510-642-1403
Email:
oren@ieor.berkeley.edu
Session 1: Market Design and Reliability
Session Chair:
Richard Tabors
rtabors@crai.com
Decision analysis and decision making in complex infrastructure investments in electricity, natural gas, water and telecommunications take place within increasingly complex market structures. While the design of electric markets has seen the greatest focus, the other infrastructures either have or are evolving in their regulatory structure as questions of reliability of supply becomes more critical.
The objective of this session is provide a forum for papers that investigate the relationship between the engineering and economics of infrastructure reliability when that reliability must be delivered, at least in part, through a evolving competitive market. The focus of the session will be upon the energy sector with specific attention to evolving electricity markets in Europe, North America and the Asia Pacific region (Australia, New Zealand and Singapore). Comparisons with or individual studies of water telecommunications will be welcomed.
Session 2: The Restructuring Process
Session Co-Chairs:
Hugh Outhred
h.outhred@unsw.edu.au
Phil Fedora
pfedora@npcc.org
Electricity restructuring is a complex, never-ending process that has engineering, economic, commercial, legal and policy dimensions. Thus there are many challenges for the design and implementation of a successful restructuring process. Moreover, the design of a restructuring process is not amenable to application the Scientific Method because key questions cannot be formulated as disprovable hypotheses. That is, there is no way beforehand to be sure that a particular design will work. Therefore, it is most important to approach the design of restructuring in manner that is as robust as possible over both the short and long term. This session would compare and contrast experiences in the design and implementation of electricity industry restructuring in North America, Europe and Australia with the intent of drawing conclusions on steps that can be taken to improve the robustness and likelihood of success of electricity industry restructuring.
Session 3: Paying for Reliability in Deregulated Markets after EPACT05
Session Chair: Tim
Mount
tdm2@cornell.edu
The
Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) has received new authority in
the Energy Policy Act of 2005 (EPACT05) to enforce reliability standards. Prior
to EPACT05, FERC was primarily an economic regulator of the wholesale
transactions and tariffs on the bulk power system. The main implications of
EPACT05 are to give FERC the authority to impose penalties on end-users if
reliability standards are violated. In addition, a new organization, the
Electric Reliability Organization (ERO), will be given the authority to
establish these reliability standards. At this time, it is not clear exactly
how this new authority will be implemented by the FERC, but state regulators
will still have the main responsibility for determining how the new standards
will be implemented (i.e. determining how much generating capacity is needed to
meet the standard). The objective of this session is to investigate how markets
can be modified to improve investment incentives for maintaining system adequacy
to maintain reliability standards. Since some capital investments are only
needed to maintain supply when equipment failures occur, these investments cover
rare events and their value is in reducing expected
unserved load. A major cause of the lack of sufficient investment incentives is
that the value of unserved load is much higher than typical market prices.
The
topics will address 1) how to identify the investments needed to maintain
reliability, and 2) how to finance them when market incentives are insufficient
to attract merchant investments.
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