Despite the end-of-school-year mania, I managed to get away to the 2017 IEEE Innovative Smart Grid Technologies conference in Washington, DC, in late April, to talk about the Smart Grid grad course that I was wrapping up at UT. I participated in a panel, “Innovations in Smart Grid Education,” chaired by Dr. Kenneth Lutz of the University of Delaware, with participants from MIT, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champain, Wichita State University, and Clemson University.
I talked about the Smart Grid grad course I taught at UT this semester, making the point that “smart grid” discussions in practice are often focused on the distribution system and end-use, despite typical definitions in the literature being more general. I took an expansive definition in this class, including transmission and generation, for example, which also allowed me to invite colleagues from ERCOT and Oncor to participate.
Why do I use an expansive definition in my pedagogy?
Because the phrase “smart grid” implies that the existing grid is stupid. In fact, for many years in North America and elsewhere, operation of the transmission grid has been incredibly sophisticated — far more sophisticated than any other infrastructure system I’m aware of.
When we focus only on making the distribution grid smart, we risk throwing the baby out with the bathwater, by not building on the existing smarts in the transmission system.
In terms of pedagogy, this means students need to be aware of the entire grid, both smart and not-so-smart, in order to avoid a skewed perspective on the electricity system. As we look toward solving problems such as integrating high levels of distributed solar PV, we need to remember that the existing transmission and generation system provides the foundational infrastructure.
Click here to download my full presentation.
Highlights of the course include an overview of architecture of the smart grid, the generation and transmission system, distribution systems, and end-use. The strongest common theme: we are all searching for a good textbook!
How to rebuild the grid in Puerto Rico
Most expansion of transmission networks, and most repair situations, involves adding or replacing equipment in an existing network. This significantly constrains the sort of solutions that can be accomplished.
However, PR is faced with a rather different problem. Although I am not personally familiar with the full extent of damage, the reports in the press suggest significant destruction of most of the network. Repair back to the state prior to the hurricane may involve rebuilding essentially everything. Under such circumstances, and given that future hurricanes may be at least as destructive to a conventional electricity system, it is prudent to step back and consider alternatives.
As an example of an alternative, perhaps a more distributed structure that plans for distributed renewables would be a better approach. Existing electric distribution networks are typically limited in the amount of distributed generation they can integrate. In the mainland US at least, the limits are typically not due to the distribution line capacity itself, but to things like “protection schemes,” typically using fuses, that were designed with the assumption of one-way flow toward consumers. In an existing system, upgrading to allow for net flow from the distribution system into the transmission system can require significant incremental investment to replace protection systems. For a system being fully built from scratch, however, it may be possible to incorporate more flexible protection systems from the start.
This and other issues should be considered carefully before large amounts of money are spent in PR on rebuilding a system according to a design that has already been shown to be vulnerable to the next hurricane.