Wichita PSERC Day 1

Yesterday was the first day of the spring 2012 PSERC conference and this year Wichita State is hosting. Unfortunately, due to the reconstruction of the student center on campus, we're hosting the conference at the newly remodeled Drury Plaza Hotel Broadview. The hotel is great but it's not the same as being on a university campus. There was a lot of interesting material covered yesterday (at least for power nerds like me) but there was one talk in particular that seemed more widely applicable; it was titled "Do We Need a 21st Century Electrical System?". The speaker's answer was a resounding "YES!" and he made a compelling case. The system we are using today is by and large over 50 years old and was built in a very piecemeal fashion with each utility around the country doing its own thing. As the system grew these utilities began to connect to each other which allowed more and more energy exchange between the utilities, helping each other during emergencies and other unexpected events. These energy exchanges soon became the daily norm these local utilities found themselves as parts of a much larger system, each controlling a small part of the system and being influenced by the choices of others, even those geographically distant. The grid when it was built was not designed with this kind of operation in mind. Energy is now routinely flowing long distances from the generators to customers and a much higher degree of coordination is needed between the utilities. More and more we are thinking of the "grid" as a single entity and a greater need for information regarding the state of the grid is becoming evident. Customers are using more and more energy and the ability to build additional transmission lines is becoming more difficult due to population growth and the lack of available land in and around urban centers. We, the power industry, are being presented with a unique opportunity. In a relatively short portion of time, much of this aging equipment will be replaced and/or upgraded; we have the possibility of largely transforming a patch-work system that has been organically grown to meet pressing needs of the moment into a system that has been designed with intentionality and foresight to handle the expected needs of the future. The hardest part of making these changes in a unified fashion is the question of coordination. Standards need to be agreed upon by all the industry members and decisions need to be made with the bigger picture in mind. This is extremely difficult to do purely from a technical standpoint, never mind the vast political complications. I don't know how this will turn out. I think we as power engineers all desperately want a better system that we have now and recognize the opportunity we have. But will we choose to sacrifice and expend effort to together to make this happen? I don't know, we'll just have to see.