The Power Systems Energy Research Center PSERC has been awarded a $5.5 million grant from the United States Department of Energy DOE to research the requirements for a systematic transformation of today’s electric grid to enable high penetrations of sustainable energy systems. According to PSERC, the future grid “needs to support high penetrations of highly variable distributed energy resources mixed with large central generation sources, energy storage, and responsive users equipped with embedded intelligence and automation. These sustainable energy systems require more than improvements to the existing system; they require transformative changes in planning and operating electric power systems.”
According to the initiative, “The grid is evolving away from a network architecture with relatively few large, hierarchicallyconnected, tightly synchronized energy resources supplying large, medium, and very many small passive consumers. It is evolving toward a network driven by many highly variable distributed energy resources mixed with large central generation sources, energy storage, and responsive users equipped with embedded intelligence and automation to meet their unique energy needs while coexisting and interacting within a complex dynamic network system.”
The working assumption of proposal is that the future grid needs to support high penetrations of sustainable energy systems. “The evolution will also be affected by decision-making objectives and flexibility across the grid. For example, tight synchronicity and balancing constraints may be relaxed through an architecture based on autonomous local energy clusters and microgrids that localize the quality standards. The future grid will also rely on an IT infrastructure with underlying communications networks that will enable the physical network, and will closely interact and support the performance objectives of sustainable energy systems. Finally, regional differences in energy resources will affect the requirements for the future grid.”