An Assessment of PIER Electric Grid Research 2003-2014 White Paper

This white paper describes the circumstances in California around the turn of the 21st century that led the California Energy Commission (CEC) to direct additional Public Interest Energy Research funds to address critical electric grid issues, especially those arising from integrating high penetrations of variable renewable generation with the electric grid. It contains an assessment of the beneficial science and technology advances of the resultant portfolio of electric grid research projects administered under the direction of the CEC by a competitively selected contractor, the University of California’s California Institute for Energy and the Environment, from 2003-2014

Impact Assessment of Hypothesized Cyberattacks on Interconnected Bulk Power Systems

The first-ever Ukraine cyberattack on power grid has proven its devastation by hacking into their critical cyber assets. With administrative privileges accessing substation networks/local control centers, one intelligent way of coordinated cyberattacks is to execute a series of disruptive switching executions on multiple substations using compromised supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems. These actions can cause significant impacts to an interconnected power grid. Unlike the previous power blackouts, such high-impact initiating events can aggravate operating conditions, initiating instability that may lead to system-wide cascading failure. A systemic evaluation of "nightmare" scenarios is highly desirable for asset owners to manage and prioritize the maintenance and investment in protecting their cyberinfrastructure. This survey paper is a conceptual expansion of real-time monitoring, anomaly detection, impact analyses, and mitigation (RAIM) framework that emphasizes on the resulting impacts, both on steady-state and dynamic aspects of power system stability. Hypothetically, we associate the combinatorial analyses of steady state on substations/components outages and dynamics of the sequential switching orders as part of the permutation. The expanded framework includes (1) critical/noncritical combination verification, (2) cascade confirmation, and (3) combination re-evaluation. This paper ends with a discussion of the open issues for metrics and future design pertaining the impact quantification of cyber-related contingencies

Quantification of efficiency improvements from integration of battery energy storage systems and renewable energy sources into domestic distribution networks

Due to the increasing use of renewable, non-controllable energy generation systems energy storage systems (ESS) are seen as a necessary part of future power delivery systems. ESS have gained research interest and practical implementation over the past decade and this is expected to continue into the future. This is due to the economic and operational benefits for both network operators and customers, battery energy storage system (BESS) is used as the main focus of this research paper. This paper presents an analytical study of the benefits of deploying distributed BESS in an electrical distribution network (DN). The work explores the optimum location of installing BESS and its impact on the DN performance and possible future investment. This study provides a comparison between bulk energy storage installed at three different locations; medium voltage (MV) side and low voltage (LV) side of the distribution transformer (DT) and distributed energy storage at customers’ feeders. The performance of a typical UK DN is examined under different penetration levels of wind energy generation units and BESS. The results show that the minimum storage size is obtained when BESS is installed next to the DT. However, the power loss is reduced to its minimum when BESS and wind energy are both distributed at load busbars. The study demonstrates that BESS installation has improved the loss of life factor of the distribution transformer