Visualization and the Smart Grid

Today’s competitive global economy requires continued advances in technology to achieve and maintain cost advantages. Critical to meeting this challenge is to ensure that the energy infrastructure is highly reliable and available and can deliver high quality power. However, the aging energy infrastructure coupled with increasing demand and more diverse power supply sources have made the energy grid more vulnerable to upsets caused by natural disasters, equipment failure, and human errors. Visualization of relevant power system parameters would improve operator situational awareness; however, the present methodologies to display the information are either too slow or have incomplete information. The August 2003 North American grid failure clearly demonstrated the need for visualization to more quickly alert operators on understanding transmission facilities status. Indeed one of the recommendations from the study (Recommendation 22) urged the use of wide-area situational visualization of the systems to better prepare the operators.

Signatech Systems, Inc., in collaboration with the University of North Carolina Charlotte (UNC Charlotte), proposes to exploit recent advances in multi-core processor and visualization technologies to design and develop revolutionary tools that will enable accurate visualization of distribution system data. This multi-phase effort will lead to the seamless integration of real-time and accurate visualization tools into the Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system.

To ensure success, the project team will collaborate with the nation’s leading utility research organizations: the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), Palo Alto, CA and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Battelle Pacific Northwest Laboratories (PNNL) , in Richland, WA. If the project shows promising results under Phase I, the project team will solicit a domestic electric utility to cost-share efforts in Phase II to develop a prototype that meets the new reliability standards. The project team has obtained support from EPRI and PNNL to explore appropriate co-sponsorship and cost-share for the successful completion of the program and commercialization of the products.