Keynote Speaker
Biography
Marija Ilić, is a Professor Emerita at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). She currently has a joint appointment of an Adjunct Professor in EECS Department and Senior Research Scientist at the MIT Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She is an IEEE Life Fellow and an elected member of the US National Academy of Engineering, and the Academia Europaea. She was the first recipient of the NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award for Power Systems in the US. She has co-authored several books on the subject of large-scale electric power systems, and has co-organized an annual multidisciplinary Electricity Industry conference series at Carnegie Mellon (http://www.ece.cmu.edu/~electriconf) with participants from academia, government, and industry. She was the founder and co-director of the Electric Energy Systems Group (EESG) at Carnegie Mellon University (http://www.eesg.ece.cmu.edu). Currently she is building EESG@MIT, in the same spirit as EESG@CMU. Most recently she has offered an open EdX course at MIT entitled ``Principles of Modeling, Simulations and Control in Electric Energy Systems”. She is founder and chief scientist at New Electricity Transmission Solutions (NETSS), Inc.
Digitization: A Path to Sustainable Decarbonization
Marija ILIC
Abstract
In this talk we explore how today's operations of electric power grids can be enhanced by evolving a hierarchically-designed and operated physical system into an interactive Cyber-Physical System (CPS). Today, the operation is fundamentally coordinated by the Energy Management Systems (EMS) sending commands to controllable power plants in their area to produce energy in a feed-forward manner. This is done at the Balancing Authority (BA) level where EMS uses its SCADA-enabled state estimator to predict power imbalances. The hard -to-predict imbalances are managed by the BAs, most often implemented using dedicated communication and control schemes.
Important for understanding new opportunities for digitization is to understand the assumptions implied in today’s operation and to design hardware and software needed to relax them. The emerging poly-centric approach to electricity services is described as a possible way forward [1]. The next generation SCADA becomes a Dynamic Monitoring and Decision System ( DyMonDS) which relaxes major assumptions through interactive information exchange [2,3]. This brings about inter-temporal and inter-spatial flexibility as a means of implementing cooperative gains and the ability to increase efficiency without sacrificing QoS. This CPS design is non-unique for any given social-ecological energy system (SEES) since it depends on the performance objectives and its resources, end users, governance system and their interactions. System governance and policy making determine the overall organization of the physical system into sub-systems with their own sub-objectives, and rules for information sharing in operations and planning. As such, they must be accounted for when building physical man-made portions of the system and the supporting CPS architecture. Design of a man-made physical grid and its cyber are done to enhance the performance of an existing man-made system. At the same time, digitization is needed to improve dynamic interactions of the SEES components and to align their sub-objectives to the best degree possible. Several real-world power grid examples are shown to illustrate its key role and potential benefits.
References
[1] https://www.dropbox.com/s/2s4bgcr4bympq3b/Ilic_Lessard_EESGatMITWP_dec302020%20-%20Copy.pdf?dl=0.
[2] Ilic, Marija D. "Toward a unified modeling and control for sustainable and resilient electric energy systems." Foundations and Trends® in Electric Energy Systems 1.1-2 (2016): 1-141.
[3] Ilić, M. D. (2010). Dynamic monitoring and decision systems for enabling sustainable energy services. Proceedings of the IEEE, 99(1), 58-79.