The need for holistic enterprise control assessment methods for the future electricity grid

Recently, the academic and industrial literature has coalesced around an enhanced vision of the electric power grid that is responsive, dynamic, adaptive and flexible. As driven by decarbonization, reliability, transportation electrification, consumer participation and deregulation, this future grid will undergo technical, economic and regulatory changes to bring about the incorporation of renewable energy and incentivized demand side management and control. As a result, the power grid will experience fundamental changes in its physical system structure and behavior that will consequently require enhanced and integrated control, automation, and IT-driven management functions in what is called enterprise control. While these requirements will open a plethora of opportunities for new control technologies, many of these solutions are largely overlapping in function. Their overall contribution to holistic techno-economic control objectives and their underlying dynamic properties are less than clear. Piece-meal integration and a lack of coordinated assessment could bring about costly-overbuilt solutions or even worse unintended reliability consequences. This work, thus, reviews these existing trends in the power grid evolution. It then motivates the need for holistic methods of integrated assessment that manage the diversity of control solutions against their many competing objectives and contrasts these requirements to existing variable energy resource integration studies. The work concludes with a holistic framework for enterprise control assessment of the future power grid and suggests directions for future work. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.