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EE Seminars

Engineering Sustainable Electricity Services


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Date:  Tue, August 17, 2010
Time:  4:30 to 5:30 PM
Location:  126 POST
Speaker:  Marija Ilic, Ph. D.

Abstract

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.


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