Introduction to Energy Power Systems Track

This track seeks to explore methods at the frontier of understanding the next generation electric energy system. It focuses on topics in smarter electric grids, engineering, economics and cyber security that are at the forefront of current research, development, and demonstration. The track contains four minitracks each having two sessions. The first minitrack is on electric power system monitoring and control. One session in this minitrack focuses on predictive and evolutionary modeling of large scale networks. This includes papers on determining the vulnerability of the transmission grid, looking at risk metrics associated with the complex grid dynamics, data representation in future grid studies, and the dynamics of electric grid frequency perturbations. The second session considers aspects of advanced real-time monitoring. Most of the session focuses on the application of phasor measurement units (PMUs), which can be used to provide real-time measurements of power system quantities with data samples of up to 30 times per second. One paper in the session looks at integrated smart grid hierarchical control. The second minitrack has two sessions dealing with topics related engineering and economic interactions within the electric grid. The first session explores issues related to economic regulation of electricity markets. Topics considered include the impact of markets on effective electricity planning, the packaging of energy and reserve bids in co-optimized electricity markets, the selling of wind energy, and the role of nodal capacity markets in insuring adequate electric resources. The second session focuses on the economic issues associated with the integration of demand (load) response and renewable resources. The third minitrack focuses on topics associated with the emerging electric infrastructures needed to accommodate a growing number of non-conventional resources such as non-controllable generation, and distributed resources. The mini-track has two sessions with the first looking into the integration of renewable resources into the existing electric grid. Papers in this session consider the impact of wind energy on generator dispatch profiles, and the integration of photovoltaic (PV) generation at the distribution level. The second session deals with the modeling and control of the electric demand. Paper topics include the consideration of thermostatically controlled loads, the measurement of aggregate demand response, and models for residential microgrids. The fourth minitrack explores electric power system cyber security and computational challenges. The first session, which focuses on cyber security and privacy, includes papers on wireless attacks of smart meters, verification and protection of confidential smart grid information, authenticcation protocols for power grid data delivery, and masking of the electric demand to protect privacy. The final session is on power grid computational issues. Papers discuss computational challenges in power grid operations, multi-rate methods for power grid analysis, the importance of bulk grid reliability data, and better power grid contingency screening methods. 2012 45th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences