Integrated Operational Resilience

Energy and Recovery

Enhancing Electricity Supply Resilience

Jeff Dagle, PE
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
August 12, 2015

Phoenix Convention Center Phoenix, Arizona

 Outline

Historical perspectives on electricity reliability

What is resilience?
The recent emergence of the smart grid
How smart grid technologies can enhance
electricity resilience
Research underway to further improve the
resilience of the future power system
Concluding remarks

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 Power System Reliability

Operational Priorities
1. Safety (public, workers)
2. Protect equipment from damage
3. Reliability of the bulk interconnected system
4. Optimize the economical operation of the system
Reserve Margins
Redundancy
Backups
Short-term (e.g., uninterruptible power supplies)
Long-term (e.g., diesel generators)

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 Basic Reliability Approach
The interconnected power system shall be operated at all
times so that general system instability, uncontrolled
separation, cascading outages, or voltage collapse will not
occur as a result of any single contingency or multiple
contingencies of sufficiently high likelihood.
WECC Minimum Operating Reliability Criteria
Otherwise known as N-1
Achieved by:
Generation having sufficient operating reserve, spinning
reserve
Strict adherence to transfer capacity limits on the
transmission grid
Determined through comprehensive planning studies
Operations discipline, detailed procedures, coordination
When all else fails, rely on emergency controls to limit
cascading failure (e.g., under frequency load shedding)
If blackout occurs, implement restoration plans (e.g.,
Black Start)
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 Historical Perspectives on Stability
Early stability problems associated with large power
plants remotely located away from metropolitan load
centers
Papers on this topic published as early as 1920
Complexity of stability problems increased as
systems became interconnected, particularly through
1960s
As some stability problems were solved with
advanced technology, others were introduced
Example: fast-acting excitation to solve transient stability
issues resulted in greater oscillatory instability
Computational capability through 1970s-1980s
greatly aided ability to study and analyze complex
stability problems
Control theory, analytical tools, transient stability software

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 Historical Perspectives on Stability - Continued

Large-scale remedial action and special protection

schemes introduced to increase interregional power
transfer capabilities
Introduction of wide area time synchronized
measurements beginning in 1980s leading to better
situational awareness capabilities today
Smart grid technologies that leverage increased
utilization of communications and computational
capabilities are being increasingly deployed
Most customer reliability issues today are related to
the local distribution system, not the interconnected
transmission grid

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 Examples of Major North American Blackouts
Uncontrolled Cascading Failures
Date Location Load Interrupted

November 9, 1965 Northeast 20,000 MW

July 13, 1977 New York 6,000 MW

December 22, 1982 West Coast 12,350 MW

March 13, 1989 Quebec 21,350 MW

January 17, 1994 California 7,500 MW

December 14, 1994 Wyoming, Idaho 9,336 MW

July 2, 1996 Wyoming, Idaho 11,743 MW

August 10, 1996 Western Interconnection 30,489 MW

June 25, 1998 Midwest 950 MW

August 14, 2003 Northeast 61,800 MW

September 8, 2011 San Diego 7,835 MW

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 Infrastructure Resilience
Ability to reduce the magnitude and/or duration of
disruptive events
Resilient infrastructure can anticipate, absorb, adapt
to, and/or rapidly recover from a disruptive event
Best when all-hazard disruptive events include the
unenvisioned
All hazards span naturally occurring events such as storms
or earthquakes and also include malicious human actions
A well-designed resilient system will either maintain
maximum practicable functionality, or enable rapid
restoration with minimum downtime, regardless of
whether or not that particular event or scenario had been
anticipated in the design and planning phase
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 Smart Grid Defined

A smart grid uses digital technology to improve

reliability, security, and efficiency of the electric
system: from large generation, through the delivery
systems to electricity consumers and a growing
number of distributed-generation and storage
resources.
The information networks that are transforming our
economy in other areas are also being applied to
applications for dynamic optimization of electric
system operations, maintenance, and planning.

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 Smart Grid Vision
Bring digital intelligence & real-time communications to transform grid operations

Demand-side resources participate with distribution

equipment in system operation
Consumers engage to mitigate peak demand
and price spikes
More throughput with existing assets
reduces need for new assets
Enhances reliability by reducing disturbance impacts,
local resources self-organize in response to contingencies
Provide demand-side ancillary services supports wind integration
The transmission and bulk generation resources get smarter too
Improve the timeliness, quality, and geographic scope of the
operators situational awareness and control
Better coordinate generation, balancing, reliability, and emergencies
Utilize high-performance computing, sophisticated sensors, and
advanced coordination strategies
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 Making the North American electricity system less
vulnerable to all hazard disruptions
The smart grid will
Enhance situational awareness
Improves visibility of the overall systems
Easier detection of deviations
Decreases time to distinguish attacks/events
Better information enables better decisions
Facilitate increased distributed generation and redundancy
Less reliance on central generation and T&D
Enable intermittent generation
Integration of renewable resources (minimize reliance on
foreign oil)
Reduce outage propagation
Self healing characteristics

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 Restoring North American electricity system integrity
subsequent to disruptions (i.e. event management)
The smart grid will
Allow compartmentalization of disturbances
Through reconfiguration, adaptive islanding, use of microgrids,
and failsafe design strategies
Facilitates informed decision making and response
Through rapid data visualization from sensors
Faster and more precise identification of event root cause
Enable faster response time responding to multiple (or
evolving) events
Restoring stakeholder confidence in the system
Enhance prioritized power restoration
Based on criticality of loads (i.e., public safety, emergency
response, national security)
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 Grid Friendly Appliances Provide Fast,
Autonomous Reliability Resource
An example of an innovative technology that is currently being
developed and demonstrated:
Autonomously detects under-
frequency events and sheds
load
Not disruptive (or even
noticeable) to consumers when
activiated
Can displace spinning reserves
and increase reliability
Prototype Grid Friendly Appliance
Low cost: no communications controllers developed by the Pacific
required Northwest National Laboratory

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 Communication and Information Technology will be
Central to Smart Grid Deployment

NIST Framework and Roadmap for

Smart Grid Interoperability Standards.
Release 1.0 (Draft), September 2009

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 Smart Grid Cyber Security

The same information and communication technologies that

enhance the resilience of the power system may also present
a new set of vulnerabilities relating to communications and
information technologies associated with the control layer of
the physical infrastructure
If there are common modes of failure present in these control
layers, there will necessarily be challenges to achieving full
degrees of resilience in future smart grid deployments
Because smart grid technologies transcend the scope of
traditional jurisdictional boundaries associated with the bulk
electricity system, we cannot rely on existing mandatory cyber
security standards and requirements

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 Concluding Remarks
The power grid is exceptionally complex, and extraordinarily
reliable
Most customer outages are due to issues with radial distribution
feeders vs. the networked transmission grid
Blackouts provide an opportunity to study and apply lessons
learned to further enhance reliability
As advanced technology is being considered for deployment, need
to consider unintended consequences (e.g., cyber security)
Robustness and resiliency are enhanced by considering all threats
to the power system
An all-hazards approach
Facility managers should build relationships with their suppliers to
better understand their electrical reliability issues
Implement best practice designs to minimize impacts of disruptive
events, including redundancy and backup equipment
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