GLOBAL POWER SYSTEM EVOLUTION

By DR. AMAL KHASHAB 

Expert Independent Consultant ,Electric Power Systems Engineering Self

ENERGYCENTRAL - Jun 18, 2021 - Driving Forces Towards Electric Power System Evolution

- Electricity is essential to modern society. We use it to light our buildings and streets and warm and cool the places where we live and work. Electric power ensures our supplies of food and clean water, powers commerce and industry, enables communication and computing, runs gas, transportation, water, and other networked infrastructures, keeps hospitals open and operating, helps to process our wastes, and many other things. In light of these critical roles that electricity plays, one has to ask about the future of electric power systems.

- No one can predict precisely what the electricity system will look like several decades from now. Because the system consists of so many long-lived facilities, it is reasonable to assume that superficially, much of it will look very much the same as it does today. Instead , there are number of driving forces (social, technical, and economic) that are likely to alter the landscape of the electric power systems. However, those drivers of change will likely interact in complex and often unpredictable ways to produce varied outcomes at different times.

-In whatever ways the power system evolves in the future, the system must be simultaneously safe and secure, clean and sustainable, affordable and equitable, and reliable and resilient. 

1) Safe and Secure

The main objectives of electric power system operator and regulator are ensuring safety while keeping the lights on, as well as making the grid and its components secure for both its physical and cyber elements. The electricity industry must continue, and build upon, its outstanding record of past performance. This include:

• Developing better technologies and management strategies to ensure public and worker safety in the face of growing numbers and severity of extreme weather events.

• Ensuring that continued attention to safe operation for both domains of utility operators and non-utility providers and customers.

• Increasing the use of automation and other technologies that are used to build and operate the system, without endangering the livelihood of utility employees.

2) Clean and Sustainable

It is a must to accelerate the transition to a clean electricity system that produces no conventional air pollution; adds no net greenhouse gas emissions to the atmosphere; minimizes terrestrial and aquatic impacts; and imposes low ecosystem disruption. Advancing this objective will require:

• Developing and deploying a large and diverse portfolio of carbon-free generation technologies, particularly as electrification to reduce and eliminate emissions from buildings, transportation, and industrial sectors.

• Minimizing adverse land and water use and ecological impacts from the power system.

• Adopting a longer-term perspective with respect to system planning and decision making on projects and systems to reduce the carbon intensity of the electricity system.

3) Affordable and Equitable

Moderately priced and universally available electricity service has been a pillar of social and economic development over the past century, and will continue to be essential even as some consumers have the means to adopt their own local technologies to generate, store, and consume electricity. Finding ways to continue to provide such service will be a critical element of ensuring continued industrial and personal prosperity. In that connection, this involves the following:

• Ensuring that the cost of electric service is affordable for all will continue to be a key to strong and equitable economic growth.

• Making concerted efforts to continue to balance the benefits and costs of system upgrades to ensures that strategies result in an increase in net social benefits. 

4. Reliable and Resilient

Electric system planners, operators, and decision makers must achieve a better understanding of the concepts of reliability and resilience. In many cases, achieving an appropriate level of performance for both of these will require different technologies, policies, and strategies. To that end there are needs for:

• Developing a secure system that can minimize the risks from physical and cyber disruptions and respond in a flexible and adaptive manner when disruptions occur.

• Acknowledging that because there is no way to make power systems completely invulnerable to intentional or accidental physical or cyber disruptions and to the effects of extreme weather events, it is a must to move forward to create systems that can continue to provide basic services as they recover from disruptions.

• Implementing technologies and polices that provide high-quality and highly reliable power to sensitive digital loads without compromising the quality and cost of service that is provided to regular customers.

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This thought leadership article was originally shared with Energy Central's Utility Management Community Group. The communities are a place where professionals in the power industry can share, learn and connect in a collaborative environment. Join the Utility Management Community today and learn from others who work in the industry.

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