Maintaining Grid Resilience with the Adoption of Smart Grid Technologies

A talk given at Dartmouth College by Jeff Dagle of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Wednesday January 23, 2013
Co-sponsored by the Institute for Security, Technology, and Society and the CS Colloquium

Abstract:
The interconnected electric power grid was recently recognized by the National Academy of Engineering as the greatest engineering achievement of the twentieth century. It has achieved high levels of reliability through the rigorous application of robust engineering principles relating to implementing resilient design practices. For example, wide-area communications are often limited to supervisory control functions that supplement localized closed-loop control systems organized in a hierarchical scheme. This enables some global optimization by changing local set-points without introducing too much dependency on these wide area communications. Industry trends now underway envision increased deployment of smart grid technologies, including wide-area monitoring, protection and control. While these technologies are intended to provide additional functionality and reliability, there nevertheless remains a concern that the unintended consequences of unenvisioned event scenarios could result in a more brittle infrastructure as a result. Particularly as it relates to cyber security, new single points of failure could be introduced that might have far-reaching consequences. The solution is maintaining careful consideration to implementing engineering design principles that enforce resilience into the architecture of the system at all levels. This presentation will provide perspectives of resiliency as it relates to electric power systems. The concept of resilience in the context of electric power systems will be defined and discussed, the impact of new technologies will be considered, different failure scenarios will be analyzed, and mitigation strategies will be recommended.