IEEE Electrification - March 2021 - 9

TABLE 1. Examples of solutions to DER impacts.
DER Impact

Possible Solution Options

Variability and ramping
challenges

 Making modifications to balancing requirements, such as levels of spinning and contingency
reserves
 Ensuring flexible resources to meet daily ramping needs
 Incorporating DERs into BPS economic dispatch and unit commitment

Lack of visibility and control by grid operators

 Development of DER aggregators and management systems
 Development of new market products and services
 Ensuring sufficient flexible resources and reserves to manage increasing uncertainty
 Coordination across the T-D system interface

Diminished local, interarea, and regional transfer
capability

 Improvements to modeling and study techniques to ensure reliable operation in a much more
variable and uncertain environment
 New tools and techniques to determine operating limits in real time
 Updates to outage schedules and operating plans

Angular instability

 Identification of must-run resources, adequate levels of system strength, and operating limits to
ensure system stability

Frequency instability and
increasing rate of change
of frequency

 Determination of critical inertia levels and enforcement of those levels during real-time operation
 Ensuring sufficient (carrying additional) frequency-responsive reserves and fast frequency response capability
 Improvements to frequency response obligation and/or measures

Reduction in steady-state
and transient voltage
stability

 Must-run BPS resources to meet local voltage stability requirements
 New transmission-connected dynamic reactive elements to support BPS voltage variability
 Modifications to reactive reserve and reactive stability studies

DER tripping and cascading outage risks

 Carrying extra reserves to ensure that loss of additional or unexpected generating resources
does not result in cascading events
 Transmission reinforcements and operating limits to avoid adverse impacts to BPS performance

considered. The solutions are wide
ranging and will fundamentally
change how the BPS is planned, operated, and designed in the future. This
will require all stakeholders to work
together to address any technical
and regulatory roadblocks. Table 1
generally focuses on impacts that
will be observed in the near- and
midterm; long-term issues and solutions will require a rethinking of
many aspects of BPS planning, operations, and design, including the
investigation of grid-forming inverters. Last, the recent Federal Energy
Regulatory Commission Order 2222
provides opportunities for DERs to
participate in wholesale markets
through aggregation techniques;
however, with the concept of aggregation and DER management systems comes significant complexity
that grid planners and operators will

need to manage to ensure BPS reliability in the future.

The North American BPS:
A Cyberphysical System
The connection between information technology and operational
technology networks is expanding,
widening potential attack surfaces
where vulnerabilities could lead to
compromised industrial control systems on the BPS. High-resolution
data from state-of-the-art sensors
and measurement devices installed
in the field are sent across communications networks to control centers for use in real-time advanced
applications and offline engineering
functions. Data quality, integrity, and
security are of utmost importance
for processes that control and operate the BPS. Therefore, security personnel are deploying analytics and

	

tools to detect, analyze, and respond
to security threats. Applications
can also ensure data integrity by
applying quality checks and using
metadata to ensure that accurate
information is provided to system
operators. Furthermore, offline engineering programs can improve in
the area of data analytics to detect
bad, corrupted, skewed, and absent
information to ensure that appropriate decisions are being made. In a
world driven by the availability of
information, security is of paramount importance.

Biography
Ryan D. Quint (Ryan.Quint@nerc.net)
is with North American Electric Reliability Corporation, Atlanta, Georgia,
30326, USA.


IEEE Electrific ation Magazine / MARCH 2 0 2 1

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IEEE Electrification - March 2021

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