Roadmaps for deployment of advanced warning systems to improve overall grid reliability: Setting the stage

The electric power grid is a highly complex system with unique challenges for ensuring safety and reliability of operations. The high degree of interconnectivity and dynamics of loads, sources, and lines has introduced vulnerability. These challenges include such factors as - aging infrastructure, transmission expansion to meet growing demands, distributed resources, congestion management, reliability coordination, renewable energy integration, etc. Other challenges facing the industry include balancing between resource adequacy, safety, reliability, economics, environmental constraints, and other public purpose objectives to optimize transmission and distribution resources to meet the needs of the end users. Accurate modeling of large-scale interconnected power system is critical in studying coordinated Power System Security Control and Inter-area oscillation modes. The effectiveness of control methods such as load shedding can be studied for damping control, voltage control and transient controlling angle, and to make use of these techniques address wide-area controls in a more coordinated fashion. This paper delineates many of the challenges that must be overcome as the industry moves forward in implementing the Smart Grid.