Critical needs for multi-disciplinary approach to teaching electric energy systems

This paper concerns the overall challenge and opportunities of introducing students to problems underlying the ongoing electric energy systems evolution. It is critical to teach both breadth and depth, but the overcrowded curricula does not allow for the huge number of courses. This calls for introducing principles of modeling, analyzing and designing future electric energy systems using concepts familiar to students from more general disciplines; of course, background in these disciplines is necessary. We give simple examples illustrating how such more general concepts at the same time help pose problems in the emerging smart grids.