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In an era when utilities and power generators rely on digital information technology (IT) infrastructure to help manage oversight of plant operations, ensuring uptime has never been more essential. Unfortunately, […]
The post Takeaways from 2024’s Biggest Outage Events appeared first on POWER Magazine.
The world is increasingly beset by severe weather events: heat waves, hurricanes, wildfires. Overall extreme events are impacting on power supply and distribution networks. Utilities are having to plan extensively about how to maintain electricity during emergencies.
One important aspect of this is ensuring that the utility can install a flexible demand response system ahead of any crisis, which can ensure a rapid load-management intervention. This can free up valuable resources for utilities, allowing them to shift those resources to other areas during large scale disasters. This article looks at three challenges in these circumstances and how to mitigate any disruption.
Severe weather usually harms the most vulnerable components of the grid: poles, lines and transformers. Customer loads need to be modulated to match reduced grid capacity until power can be rerouted or distribution assets can be repaired or replaced. This requires information about the entire grid and input from sensors located throughout.
Geographic grouping of demand response resources (at the substation level or other grid sections) can enable faster dispatch of these resources when grid assets are damaged.…
The post Are 1-in-10-Year Events Really 1-in-10-Year Events Anymore? appeared first on POWER Magazine.
When evaluating resource adequacy requirements, many power companies and grid operators have used a methodology that originated more than 70 years ago. This probabilistic reliability approach has generally performed adequately through the years. It has generally evaluated loss-of-load events occurring at frequencies of one-day-in-10-years (1-in-10) to be acceptable in terms of system reliability.
However, it’s not without risk, as incidents in Texas, California, and other parts of the country and world have demonstrated in recent history. In light of these events, it’s worth asking: have risks changed? It could be that the method used to evaluate what constitutes a 1-in-10 event is no longer sound.
“When you have 1-in-a-5 or 1-in-a-10-year event that’s happening every year, most likely those are not 1-in-a-10 or 1-in-100-year events,” Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) CEO Arshad Mansoor said as a guest on The POWER Podcast.
“Really, what we need to go is beyond that.…