Emerging Trends and Systemic Issues Influencing Today’s U.S. Electric Grid

Abstract

With increasing shifts from vertically integrated to horizontally structured operations and from centralized to distributed electric power delivery, today’s electric power grid (the “grid”) operators and designers face the challenge of creating an architecture that accommodates a host of diverse requirements. The grid’s modes of operation must address concerns of reliability and stability, new deployments of renewable energy sources, threats from cyber-attacks and natural disasters, and increasingly distributed system operations. Grid modernization calls for a reliable, affordable, sustainable, agile, secure, and resilient grid. However, the modernization of the U.S. power grid is hampered by mounting complexity and diverging objectives from owners and operators and is consequently risky and fraught with potential missteps. Flawed architecture, design, and implementation will lead to stranded investments and lost opportunities. A principled approach to minimize risk and develop a robust grid of the future is to begin with a sound architecture for the grid to inform the design process. Architecture development starts with the context of influencing factors that provide constraints as well as driving goals. This report provides the context of emerging trends and cross-cutting systemic issues in the U.S. electric power grid and serves as a vital input for grid architecture development.After a brief introduction, the first part of the document (Section 2) presents a listing of emerging trends, which are factors that are typically exogenous but on occasion endogenous to the grid today. Here, we define the emerging trends as those drivers that create challenges, opportunities, and influence future directions in the evolution of the grid. These could be technology, policy, or societally driven and cause the grid to evolve and adapt if and where necessary. The emerging trends are organized by vertical categories including generation, load, control, data and communications, operation and planning, business and markets, and grid properties attracting increasing worldwide attention, including resilience, physical and cyber security, and decarbonization. There has been continuous network convergence and growing dependence among gas, heat, electricity, building, transportation and information and communication technology (ICT) systems. With increasing penetration of distributed energy resources, grid-interactive efficient buildings (GEBs), demand response, smart edge-devices, as well as microgrids – components emerging as the fundamental building blocks of the electricity delivery system - today’s electric grid needs to transform itself into a more distributed and flexible structure in a socially equitable and secure manner.The second part (Section 3) of this document presents a listing of the cross-cutting systemic issues, which are structural and run-time considerations of grid operations that are extant in the grid and deserve to be addressed to support new requirements and objectives. We define systemic issues as those inherent in the overall system that create challenges in design and operation that need to be solved. Systemic issues arising from the listed trends are organized by categories, such as grid properties, network convergence, grid structure, generation, load, control, data and communications, and operations and markets. Although, the nation’s electric power system is a highly complex system that continues to rapidly transform because of a combination of advancing technology, evolving regulatory structures, and changes in society, it is becoming even more complex with increasing dependencies and dynamics arising from renewable energy resources, electric vehicles, distributed generation technologies, and external stressors—both natural and man-made. With the emerging grid characteristics such as grid volatility, fast system dynamics, and increasing requirements of system resilience, cyber and physical security and decarbonization, on top of aging infrastructure and legacy structures, today’s U.S. grid is facing unprecedented risks and challenges. New methods and tools are needed to help decision makers to manage complexity, identify hidden interactions and technical gaps, and make the correct decisions as changes are made to modernize the grid.