Maintaining Grid Resilience with the Adoption of Smart Grid Technologies

Wednesday January 23, 2013 at 4:15, Steele 006
Jeff Dagle
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Co-sponsored by the CS Colloquium

Abstract

Jeff Dagle

The interconnected electric power grid was recently recognized by the National Academy of Engineering as the greatest engineering achievement of the twentieth century. It has achieved high levels of reliability through the rigorous application of robust engineering principles relating to implementing resilient design practices. For example, wide-area communications are often limited to supervisory control functions that supplement localized closed-loop control systems organized in a hierarchical scheme. This enables some global optimization by changing local set-points without introducing too much dependency on these wide area communications. Industry trends now underway envision increased deployment of smart grid technologies, including wide-area monitoring, protection and control. While these technologies are intended to provide additional functionality and reliability, there nevertheless remains a concern that the unintended consequences of unenvisioned event scenarios could result in a more brittle infrastructure as a result. Particularly as it relates to cyber security, new single points of failure could be introduced that might have far-reaching consequences. The solution is maintaining careful consideration to implementing engineering design principles that enforce resilience into the architecture of the system at all levels. This presentation will provide perspectives of resiliency as it relates to electric power systems. The concept of resilience in the context of electric power systems will be defined and discussed, the impact of new technologies will be considered, different failure scenarios will be analyzed, and mitigation strategies will be recommended.

Bio

Mr. Jeff Dagle has worked at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, operated by Battelle for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), since 1989 and currently manages several projects in the areas of transmission reliability and security, including the North American SynchroPhasor Initiative (NASPI) and cyber security reviews for the DOE Smart Grid Investment Grants and Smart Grid Demonstration Projects associated with the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. He is a Senior Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), a member of the International Society of Automation (ISA) and National Society of Professional Engineers (NSPE), and is a licensed Professional Engineer in the State of Washington. He received the 2001 Tri-City Engineer of the Year award by the Washington Society of Professional Engineers, led the data requests and management task for the U.S.-Canada Power System Outage Task Force investigation of the August 14, 2003 blackout, supported the DOE Infrastructure Security and Energy Restoration Division with on-site assessments in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina in fall 2005, and is the recipient of two patents, a Federal Laboratory Consortium (FLC) Award in 2007, and an R&D 100 Award in 2008 for the Grid Friendly™ Appliance Controller technology. Mr. Dagle was a member of a National Infrastructure Advisory Council (NIAC) study group formed in 2010 to establish critical infrastructure resilience goals. He received B.S. and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Washington State University in 1989 and 1994, respectively.

Jeff Dagle's Presentation Slides