Power grids get jolt of net mgmt.

By Ellen Messmer
Network World, 05/21/01

With summertime blackouts looming in California and elsewhere, the power industry acknowledges it has no network management technology to get a shared, real-time view of electricity flows or predict bottlenecks across the nation's three main grids.

That's all about to change.

Those three transmission grids, which are independently operated and date to the 1970s, have seen volumes grow from 200,000 bulk electricity transactions four years ago to 1.5 million last year as deregulation spurs new buying and selling patterns. The two larger grids are known as the Eastern and Western Interconnections; the third, just for Texas, is called the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT).

An advanced Web-based risk-management system called the Real-Time Security Data Display (RSDD) is being deployed to fill the management void. The software tools take power flow data and provide regional security coordinators with a bird's eye view of grid reliability across North America.

The tools were developed by the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) in Palo Alto, which provides technology and services to 1,000 electricity providers in North America. Assisting EPRI is the North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC), an organization of power suppliers and customers established in Princeton, N.J., after the catastrophic Northeast blackout of 1965.

Currently there is no way for power providers to get the big picture on a real-time basis.

"We are testing this nextgeneration network monitoring and control tool in a full network for load testing," says Bill Donahue, a senior vice president at Consolidated Edison of New York. "It is going to provide us new opportunities to improve our system."

'New methodology'

"It's a whole new methodology for assessing transmission reliability," says Mike Greene, president of TXU Electric, which is also testing RSDD. The nation's transmission system "is being used much more differently than it once was, and there are many more buyers and sellers out there than there used to be. We need more tools to help us analyze what's happening."

The best shared data that Con Ed and other utilities now get is through EPRI's FTP-based "Tag Dump Program," the name for software that collects aggregated transaction schedules on a control-area-to-control-area basis. But Tag Dump is only available for the Eastern region, with ERCOT and Western regions still to be implemented.

"We're putting more stress on the grid, and there's a lot of finger-pointing as to why," says Terry Boston, executive vice president at the Tennessee Valley Authority.

"We're hauling more generation longer distances. We need better tools for real-time security display," Boston adds.

While no silver bullet, the ambitious RSDD risk-management tool is expected to provide analytical data during the next few years that could lead to substantial redesign of the North American grids.

"We're having excessive congestion - it's like the freeway in California," says Karl Stahlkopf, EPRI's vice president of power delivery. "Our infrastructure, both in terms of age and in terms of transmission and generation, has not kept up with the needs of the U.S."

Stahlkopf notes that "power is now flowing in unexpected ways," and the vast majority of outages occur because of problems in getting electricity transfers to the right place at the right time.

"The more you know about a problem, the better chance you have of fixing it with better, quicker analysis," he says.

NERC has established 10 regional reliability councils whose members deliver almost all the electricity supplied in the U.S.

The organization has built a nationwide T-1 private network called NERCNet for use by these 10 control-area security coordinators. NERCNet can get access to real-time information on electric equipment that includes 300 bus voltage devices and 50 flow gates across the three main grids.

At NERC's office, the server-based RSDD risk-management tool sits with direct access to the NERCNet to collect data on an ongoing basis from the flow gates and voltage devices using specialized log-polling techniques. This information is combined on an ongoing basis to present a real-time geographic view of transmission grid maps with color-coded flows that can be viewed via Web browser by security operators around the country.

According to EPRI engineer Steve Lee, the RSDD tool can also analyze root causes of congestion and provide mitigation plans. RSDD is designed to predict the likelihood of an undesirable event in the transmission system and its severity.

Sorting out the nation's electricity woes won't happen overnight, in part because the utilities are trying to adapt to vast regulatory changes.

Under deregulation schemes designed to give customers choice, power distributors are required to share retail customer information with new rivals. At the same time they can buy and sell excess-capacity bulk electricity wholesale over an increasingly congested grid.

Regional authorities in control

In addition, grid interconnections are coming under the control of newly minted regional authorities known as the Independent System Operators (ISO), which play traffic cop for the free-market system.

The public has only a vague notion about them, but that's changing as the beleaguered California ISO makes headlines with its daily struggle to control rolling blackouts. The ISOs, newcomers to the grid, say they plan to play an active role in industrywide risk management.

"EPRI has done a great job bringing new tools for operations, and it's hoped that these new tools will get the next-generation transmission built," says Steve Whitley, vice president of system operation at the New England ISO, which oversees grid management for six states.

The New England ISO, which recently took on the responsibility to "keep the lights on" in its area, doesn't have a congestion-management system but plans to use RSDD, Whitley says. New England is fortunate to have eight new power plants come online in the past two years, with 15 more under construction, he says.

In addition to RSDD, the Web is playing a role for the power providers in other new ways.

Under deregulation plans in some states, if a customer chooses to buy from an alternative supplier, the utility or distributor that originally had that customer has to share the customer data with the competing supplier, and authorities such as the ISO overseeing the change.

The Midwest ISO, headquartered in Indiana, includes about 12 utilities operating in about a dozen states.

The Midwest ISO will oversee its regional grid beginning in November and is working on plans to use Web-based communications so the authorized power provider and the ISO can share information when electric-power customers switch.

"The old vertically integrated utilities are not used to sharing this information about customers," says Mary Lin Webster, a spokeswoman for the organization.

Allegheny Energy of Maryland, which operates in five states, altered its internal business practices to unbundle billing components.

As part of that process, Allegheny installed Lodestar's database application for billing customers. Lodestar, a software provider to the utilities, has tailored applications to meet changing regulatory rules.

Allegheny now may e-mail a customer's electricity-usage information to competitors if the customer approves sharing of the data, says Cynthia Menhorn, Allegheny's general manager of regulated pricing services.

Though only a small percentage of customers have actually switched providers, Menhorn says, the prospect of competition in electricity savings has many larger businesses, such as Wal-Mart and Saks, appointing an employee as "energy manager" to check prices.

Allegheny plans to provide a Web site so customers can get this data more easily.

In Texas, the state government designated ERCOT as the ISO to work with power suppliers to open the retail market for competition by June 2002. ERCOT is set to launch a pilot program next month that will let about 5% of customers in the state chose among providers. ERCOT has defined data formats so authorized utilities and distributors can send customer data as either electronic data interchange (EDI) over a value-added network or to the ERCOT Web portal, says Les Barrow, chair of the organization's technical advisory committee.

Customer change orders will have to be approved by the state's regulatory body, the Public Utility Commission of Texas, before billing changes are made. That's because regulators are concerned about "slamming" - the term for unauthorized, illegal changes that have occurred frequently in the telecommunications industry.

Shell Energy, which is participating in the Texas pilot, expects to share data with ERCOT using EDI, says Tim Byers, Shell's CIO.

"The Texas model is very elegant," Byers says. "We send information to ERCOT, and ERCOT sends it to the marketers. Before, we never sent records to our competitors. But now you, as a customer, have a choice and you can switch."

Provided, of course, that supply keeps pace with demand and the grids work as designed.

According to its energypolicy report issued last week, the Bush administration predicts the country will be using 45% more electric power 20 years from now. If that forecast proves accurate, the power industry's new Web-based management and risk-assessment initiatives will face a baptism by fire.

Power grids get jolt of net mgmt.

'New methodology'

Regional authorities in control

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