Smart Grid Seminar

Today's energy systems, such as electric power grids and gas grids, already demonstrate complex nonlinear dynamics where, e.g., collective effects in one exert uncertainty and irregularities on the other. These collective dynamics are not well understood, and are expected to become more complex tomorrow as the grids are pushed to reliability limits, interdependencies grow, and appliances become more intelligent and autonomous. Tomorrow's will have to integrate the intermittent power from wind and solar farms whose fluctuating outputs create far more complex stress on power grid operations, often dependent, e.g. in providing fast regulation control, on the gas supply. Conversely, one anticipates the significant effect of the wind-following gas fired turbines on reliability of the gas grid. Guarding against the worst of those perturbations will require taking protective measures based on ideas from optimization, control, statistics and physics.

In this talk, we introduce a few of the physical, optimization and control principles and phenomena in today's energy grids and those that are expected to play a major role in tomorrow's grids.

Specifically, we will review DOE/OE and DTRA sponsored efforts at LANL towards describing the effect of the intermittent power generation on reliability, controls and dependencies of the natural gas operations and the power systems operations.