Dynamic monitoring and decision systems maximize energy resources.
Marija Ilic is professor of engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University, and is honorary chaired professor for control of future electricity network operations, Delft University of Technology. Email her at milic@ece.cmu.edu.
The operations and planning rules for integrating variable resources aren’t the same across the electric power industry in the United States at present. Opinions are somewhat divided about what these should be, as well as the assessments of potential benefits and costs. In order to support sustainable deployment of variable resources at value, it’s critical to identify major sources of potential problems and to proactively design and implement a systematic framework for managing their unique characteristics as reliably and efficiently as possible. It would be possible to efficiently and reliably integrate relatively large-scale wind capacity in the existing electric power grids provided that this is done in coordination with responsive demand. However, in order for this to happen, it’s critically important to manage industry risk in qualitatively different ways than is done at present.