A reliable grid to support markets

Market forces and deregulation bring the conflict to the forefront, because individual players have to maximize their own objectives. Many of these players are not directly responsible for reliability. Markets become more efficient as constraints are mitigated. Integration and/or coordination of market information over ever-increasing portions of the interconnections is the order of the times. While markets are evolving, they depend on a reliable grid to meet their objectives. Such grid-wide coordination should include operational planning as well as emergency control decisions based on accurate and synchronized information across the power grid in a timely manner. Such system has to be distributed and coordinated throughout the power grid to enable fast local control based on global information. The architecture should allow for autonomous intelligent functional agents distributed throughout the system at various levels of control hierarchy. The tasks could be grouped into various execution cycles that collectively cover real-time operations of the power grid starting from hour-ahead scheduling of the market and other resources to rapid control of the power system transients. There is a current EPRI-sponsored project looking into these concepts. Key aspects of these concepts was explored in this panel session.