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Suggested Citation:"5 The Future of the Grid." National Research Council. 2013. The Resilience of the Electric Power Delivery System in Response to Terrorism and Natural Disasters: Summary of a Workshop. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18535.
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5

The Future of the Grid

Technologies discussed at the workshop could shape the electric grid in coming years. Clark Gellings, EPRI, noted that integrating new and existing technologies could address the issues of prevention, recovery, and survivability. Much of this focus is on distributed generation and smart grid technologies. David Owens, Edison Electric Institute, suggested that an important issue is how to ensure reliability, safety, and fairness, particularly in light of increasing renewable portfolio standards and public policy driving much of the emphasis on distributed generation.

Distributed Generation

Mr. Owens noted that distributed generation can offer stability but will require increased coordination. Currently, utilities look at very discrete customers with distributed power sources, but moving forward there is the potential for a much wider deployment of distributed generation, which could pose a challenge for reliability and safety as power flow becomes a two-way street. Mr. Gellings recognized that such change will be inevitable—the question is not whether more connection is going to happen but how best to adapt when it does (Figure 5-1).

image

FIGURE 5-1 Operational evolution of the grid, showing a historical diagram of the typical grid structure from 1978 to 2001 (left) compared to the evolving grid structure incorporating microgrids (right). SOURCE: Adapted by Newport from the California Institute for Energy and Environment and presented by David Owens, Edison Electric Institute, February 27, 2013.

Suggested Citation:"5 The Future of the Grid." National Research Council. 2013. The Resilience of the Electric Power Delivery System in Response to Terrorism and Natural Disasters: Summary of a Workshop. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18535.
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One audience participant asked why, if distributed generation is such a certainty, there is not currently a wider deployment of microgrids. Granger Morgan, CMU, pointed to issues with interconnections as well as evolving IEEE standards related to the issue of islanding; additional resilience is one of the benefits of a microgrid, but utilities are also concerned about safety issues with a partially activated system, according to Mr. Owens. There is also significant concern about funding and cost recovery—Mr. Owens pointed out that while there is an increased interest in improvements to the distribution system, much of the investment is falling on the utilities to ensure reliability and eliminate vulnerabilities associated with increased use of distributed generation. It is difficult to fairly account for these additional costs, many of which are coming under review by FERC and state PUCs. Mr. Owens cited net metering as one particular case that does not adequately account for the fact that a customer’s renewable generation from rooftop solar, for example, is not equivalent to power generated by the grid. John Kassakian, MIT, also pointed to renewable portfolio standards as a key cost burden being placed unfairly on utilities through public policy. Dr. Morgan noted that one policy prohibiting the existence of microgrids in some areas of the country involved exclusive service territory rules1 and suggested examining the loosening of such rules to allow modest-size microgrids.

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Because of an increasing focus on distributed sources of generation, energy storage is a particular issue of concern. Patricia Hoffman, DOE, pointed to work with Southern California Edison on an 8-MW Li-ion battery-based storage plant to complement a Tehachapi Pass wind farm as an example of ongoing research in this arena, noting that the evolving grid system needs to be thought about holistically.

The Smart Grid

Much of what has enabled distributed generation is related to smart grid technologies. Anjan Bose, Washington State University, noted that smart metering allows for consideration of distributed load as well as distributed generation. Dr. Bose suggested that the data currently being collected needs to feed into control systems. Mr. Owens pointed out that legacy distribution systems will have to be redeveloped to support such bi-directional and variable power flows safely and reliably.

In addition to greater real-time control, smart grid technologies can be used to reduce load through demand response. Ms. Hoffman pointed to a number of examples of utilities that have used smart grid technologies successfully. On the customer side, Oklahoma Gas and Electric

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1 K. Twaite, 2012, Monopoly money: Reaping the economic and environmental benefits of microgrids in exclusive utility service territories, Vermont Law Review 35:975-998, available at http://lawreview.vermontlaw.edu/files/2012/02/twaite.pdf.

Suggested Citation:"5 The Future of the Grid." National Research Council. 2013. The Resilience of the Electric Power Delivery System in Response to Terrorism and Natural Disasters: Summary of a Workshop. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18535.
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was able to implement time-of-use and variable peak/critical peak pricing to reduce peak load by 30 percent. On the distribution side, automated circuit switches and sensor equipment implemented by the Electric Power Board of Chattanooga are estimated to have reduced customer outage minutes by 40 percent. And on the transmission side, 18 transmission owners within the Western Electricity Coordinating Council are installing and connecting 341 power management units and 62 power distribution centers to modernize transmission in the Western Interconnection. According to Ms. Hoffman, such implementation can enable a truly active distribution system that can be managed cost-effectively through a broad selection of technologies.

Suggested Citation:"5 The Future of the Grid." National Research Council. 2013. The Resilience of the Electric Power Delivery System in Response to Terrorism and Natural Disasters: Summary of a Workshop. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18535.
×
Page 22
Suggested Citation:"5 The Future of the Grid." National Research Council. 2013. The Resilience of the Electric Power Delivery System in Response to Terrorism and Natural Disasters: Summary of a Workshop. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18535.
×
Page 23
Suggested Citation:"5 The Future of the Grid." National Research Council. 2013. The Resilience of the Electric Power Delivery System in Response to Terrorism and Natural Disasters: Summary of a Workshop. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18535.
×
Page 24
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The Resilience of the Electric Power Delivery System in Response to Terrorism and Natural Disasters is the summary of a workshop convened in February 2013 as a follow-up to the release of the National Research Council report Terrorism and the Electric Power Delivery System. That report had been written in 2007 for the Department of Homeland Security, but publication was delayed because of security concerns. While most of the committee's findings were still relevant, many developments affecting vulnerability had occurred in the interval. The 2013 workshop was a discussion of the committee's results, what had changed in recent years, and how lessons learned about the grid's resilience to terrorism could be applied to other threats to the grid resulting from natural disasters. The purpose was not to translate the entire report into the present, but to focus on key issues relevant to making the grid sufficiently robust that it could handle inevitable failures without disastrous impact. The workshop focused on five key areas: physical vulnerabilities of the grid; cybersecurity; mitigation and response to outages; community resilience and the provision of critical services; and future technologies and policies that could enhance the resilience of the electric power delivery system.

The electric power transmission and distribution system (the grid) is an extraordinarily complex network of wires, transformers, and associated equipment and control software designed to transmit electricity from where it is generated, usually in centralized power plants, to commercial, residential, and industrial users. Because the U.S. infrastructure has become increasingly dependent on electricity, vulnerabilities in the grid have the potential to cascade well beyond whether the lights turn on, impacting among other basic services such as the fueling infrastructure, the economic system, and emergency services. The Resilience of the Electric Power Delivery System in Response to Terrorism and Natural Disasters discusses physical vulnerabilities and the cybersecurity of the grid, ways in which communities respond to widespread outages and how to minimize these impacts, the grid of tomorrow, and how resilience can be encouraged and built into the grid in the future.

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