Engineers, policymakers discuss resource adequacy, cybersecurity under changing grid conditions

May 28, 2022 Editor

Grid operators can only plan for contingencies that they have seen before. That was the message from Julia Matevosyan from ERCOT. — Texas substation. Photo by ETA+ on Unsplash

Grid operators can only plan for contingencies that they have seen before. That was the message from Julia Matevosyan, Chief Engineer at Energy Systems Integration Group (ESIG) and former Lead Planning Engineer at ERCOT.

Matevosyan was speaking on a panel along with former Governor of Texas Rick Perry and Massoud Amin, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of Minnesota. The panel was moderated by Clarion Event’s VP of Energy Content, David Wagman and took place during the DISTRIBUTECH and POWERGEN International leadership summit in Dallas, Texas on May 23.

Matevosyan said the extreme weather event that hit Texas during February 2021 could not have been predicted and planned for. Fifty percent of the generating capacity tripped offline during that storm, which resulted in rolling power outages that lasted for days on end and ultimately lead to the deaths of more than 200 people.

When you take a road trip, you don’t bring 50% more fuel along with you on the off chance that you won’t be able to find a gas station, she said. You can prepare for severe events but you generally don’t prepare for events of that magnitude.

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However, Matevosyan said that better tools would help ensure that catastrophes like that don’t happen again. For one, she’d like to see more forecasts that predict not just the weather but instead forecast how extreme weather correlates to load behaviour and generation behaviour. “There is no weather data set with which you can plan wind production, solar production and load behaviour,” she said. She said she’d like to see those type of correlations incorporated into datasets and said there is more work to do in that area.

Amin who is generally believed to be the “father of the smart grid” said that the grid can be operated with less shock absorbers if it is operated more intelligently, but also said that cybersecurity must be built into the system.

“We don’t have workforce that is capable of working on cybersecurity,” he said. Most engineers don’t understand cybersecurity vulnerabilities until something happens, he added. Amin also stressed the importance of a balanced approach to the issue of cybersecurity. “Vendors say the sky is falling” whereas engineers sometimes feel that their systems are bulletproof when they are not.

Perry, who said that most “policymakers don’t understand physics that well,” stressed the importance of the 17 national labs in the U.S. as great places to test new technologies on the grid.

Panel participants agreed that policy needs to lead the way forward when thinking about grid transformation, but standards must follow said Matevosyn and Amin, especially with regard to a grid powered by a much larger number of inverter-based resources.

The technology exists to transform the grid, said Amin, but education, awareness and standards are not there yet and must be developed by operators, project developers and vendors. Amin further stressed the importance of sharing best practices, too, which is exactly what happens at DISTRIBUTECH.

A recording of the Leadership Summit session will be available in the coming months on the DISTRIBUTECH Plus network.

This post was originally published on Power-Grid International in light of DISTRIBUTECH 2022.