February 3, 2010

Marija Ilic, Carnegie Mellon University

In this lecture we pose the problem of sustainable electricity services as a novel systems engineering design problem. We briefly summarize today's operating and planning practices and explain why these need fundamental changing in order to enable qualitatively different electricity services. In particular, we suggest that many new resources have characteristics, which are not generally known to the system operators, and are, therefore, currently not relied on for managing supply and demand in an often-congested electric network. The new resources are also highly variable and, as such, do not lend themselves to static feed-forward scheduling without near-real time automated feedback. Instead, a transformation of this operating and planning mode into an interactive multi-temporal, multi-spatial and multi-contextual system management is needed to accommodate ever-changing system conditions, often driven by many distributed actions. In order to enable a complex system with often-conflicting functionalities, such as reliability, security, short- and long-term efficiency, and sustainability, one must rely on prediction, adaptation and adjustments by all.

We introduce a Dynamic Monitoring and Decision Systems (DYMONDS) framework as one such possible interactive framework in support of on-line sensing and decision making at various industry layers capable of meeting multiple metrics. Notably, the framework aligns the choice-driven sub-objectives by the customers and energy providers with the social objectives. As an illustration, we provide a DYMONDS-enabled solution to efficient integration of large wind and solar power in coordination with demand-side response. Finally, we illustrate how technological, economic and regulatory signals within the proposed framework converge making the industry evolution sustainable in the broadest sense of the word.

1. Global Climate Architectural Policy
2. Demystifying and De-Jargoning the Smart Grid
3. U.S. Shale Gas: From Resources and Reserves to Carbon Isotope Anomalies
4. Extending the Grid: Transmission Siting Issues and How to Resolve Them
5. Integrating More Than 50% Wind on the Grid: A Case Study
6. Controlling Climate Change after Copenhagen
7. The Energy Challenge and the Case for Fusion
8. COP15 and the Stanford Student Experience
9. China's Growing Global Influence: A Solar Energy Perspective

The Energy Seminar is produced by the Woods Institute and the Precourt Institute for Energy (PIE) at Stanford University. and is comprised of an interdisciplinary series of talks primarily by Stanford experts on a broad range of energy topics.







The Precourt Institute for Energy (PIE) has been established as a new independent institute at Stanford that engages in a broad-ranging, interdisciplinary program of research and education on energy - applying fundamental research to the problem of supplying energy in environmentally and economically acceptable ways, using it efficiently, and facing the behavioral, social, and policy challenges of creating new energy systems for the U.S. and the world.