IEEE Power & Energy Magazine - January/February 2020 - 8

leader's corner

MY GOOD FRIEND AND FORMER
IEEE Power & Energy Society (PES)
President Wanda Reeder gave a talk at
PowerTech in 2017 and summed it up like
this: everything's changing-the way we
make it, the way we move it, and the way
we use it. And everything's changing at
the same time! Since her talk, I think
we can add one more to the list in 2020:
the way we sell it. Hawaii has already
adopted the Ratepayer Protection Act,
which will require utilities to change
their business models and fully decouple
revenue and capital expenses.
The traditional power system, with
central station generation, transmission networks, and radial distribution
networks, is going to change. The only
question is the pace of that change.
Rooftop solar and photovoltaic (PV)
farms are popping up everywhere, depending on local regulations. A number of pilots are also already under way
with microgrids designed to enhance
resiliency and community microgrids
designed to share renewable resources
within the neighborhood.
We held our third Annual Energy
Thought Leaders Symposium, "Energy
Transitions-The Coming Decade," at
the Center for Distributed Energy at
Georgia Tech in August 2019. There is
now a consensus that change is like a
freight train, tough to stop and coming
fast. Some examples of change discussed at the symposium included
the following:
✔ Electrification of transportation
* Electric vehicle (EV) deployment
across the globe is growing at
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MPE.2019.2945346
Date of current version: 7 January 2020

ieee power & energy magazine

Frank Lambert

changes are coming!
how we can prepare now

40-60% year over year, including EVs, buses, trucks, and semis.
* A fast-charging infrastructure
is needed for urban, low-income, and rural EVs and truck/
bus fleets.
* In five years, EVs will be a major
load on the U.S. grid, and grid coordination/integration will be key.
✔ Data centers
* Data centers are growing fast,
with large new centers consuming 100 MW plus.
* In five years, data centers are expected to grow to 10% of the U.S.
electrical energy consumption.
✔ PVs, wind, storage and other renewable resources
* PV and wind energy, including 4 h of energy storage, were
priced in 2019 at US$32/MWh
and US$24/MWh, respectively,
dispatchable and at a much lower
cost than base generation.
* There is strong interest from
commercial, industrial, and residential users in clean renewable
energy.
* The need for dynamic balancing of the grid under distributed
energy resource variability exists as does the need for storage
to deliver time-shifted energy
back to the grid.
* The ability to operate microgrids
connected to or islanded from
the grid offers new opportunities and challenges.
✔ Other major factors
* All devices at the grid edge are
becoming intelligent, communications enabled, and, in many
cases, capable of taking autono-

mous action to change their behavior or interaction with the grid.
* The cyberphysical security of
the grid is becoming an extremely important issue.
* Resiliency of the grid following major climate events is
needed, or there may be widearea service disruptions.
* Distributed and decentralized
control of the grid is necessary.
* Shrinking markets for grid
assets and global competitive
pressures are causing traditional vendors to abandon the grid
business; attrition of the vendor
base may pose a n ex istential threat.
* In a highly regulated market,
with state control over utilities,
it is very challenging for rapid
change to occur. The appetite for
risk in such a regulated market
is very low, making it difficult
for new technologies to be tried
out on the grid side. So how will
rapid change be managed?
PES is leading the effort to understand
these changes and develop standards to
make them work effectively and safely
with the existing grid. PES University has
recently been launched to help engineers
develop and deploy the grid of the future,
keep current with new developments, and
earn continuing education units/professional development hours for their Professional Engineer requirements. These
resources can be found at https://www
.ieee-pes.org/professional-development/
pes-university. The PES Resource Center,
http://resourcecenter.ieee-pes.org/, is also
available to our members with a multitude
of technical resources.
january/february 2020

https://www.ieee-pes.org/professional-development/pes-university https://www.ieee-pes.org/professional-development/pes-university https://www.ieee-pes.org/professional-development/pes-university http://resourcecenter.ieee-pes.org/

IEEE Power & Energy Magazine - January/February 2020

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