IEEE Power & Energy Magazine - November/December 2021 - 50

The control room is at the core of all efforts
to monitor and maintain reliability in the
face of shifting power system conditions.
human operators need to effectively interface with this information
and take well-informed actions.
Alternatively, information on power system conditions and
potential risks must lead to automated actions if humans cannot
reasonably respond in time to avoid reliability issues. The
control room is at the core of all efforts to monitor and maintain
reliability in the face of shifting power system conditions.
As the grid becomes more dynamic and stochastic, the control
room must be equipped to collect, process, and react to more
information than ever before. Failure to keep pace with these
challenges can result in additional costs, increased emissions,
and/or reduced reliability and performance. For example, if
system operators are forced to reduce clean IBR generation or
turn on more expensive fossil-fueled generation to maintain
stability, then both costs and emissions rise.
Wind and solar PV renewable energy variability and uncertainty
combine with the fundamental, almost instantaneous,
supply-demand balance requirement of the power system. This
means that wind and solar PV energy should be forecasted
in advance as accurately as possible to dispatch all flexibility
resources to maintain the balance. Resources need to be
scheduled accordingly across multiple time horizons while also
accounting for the inevitability of inaccu rate forecasts.
System operators are also tasked with managing numerous
natural and man-made disasters that may impact the power
system, even as the frequency and severity of natural disasters
continue to increase. Though these may be noncredible events,
system operators are increasingly driven to ensure some residual
level of supply-demand balance, even as both supply-side
and demand-side resources are impacted by conditions such as
severe hot- or cold-weather events, fires, and storms. Preparing
and responding to such events will require significant visibility
into real-time system operations and the ability to dispatch
resources at nearly every level of the power system.
Given the speed at which many of these factors can
change because of changes in the distribution system impacting
DERs, sudden changes in resource availability (e.g., cloud
cover), or interactions between IBRs, power system operators
will have to process information and reach decisions significantly
faster than they did in the past. With an increase in
change sources, not only must the information be processed
more quickly, but also, significant events will become more
common. Addressing these issues may require a combination
of telemetry and communication infrastructure to collect
data, novel visualizations, and tools (e.g., machine learning
or artificial intelligence) to help system operators interpret
the data and potentially automate responses.
Figure 2 is one possible vision for the control room of the
future; the operators are immersed in a 3D visual environment
with the most important information being displayed
intuitively. This is in contrast to the current situation (see
inset), where the operator has a multitude of visual displays,
all of which may be important. The assumption here is that
many of the operator actions have been automated and the
control room is adaptively presenting the most important
information requiring real-time decisions.
As the power system evolves, system operators will need
new tools and operating paradigms to deal with a more inverterbased,
variable, and distributed grid. Here, for instance, operators
may need to monitor inertia in real time to ensure that adequate
frequency control is available or may require better tools to track
the impact of DERs on the demand they are serving. Rapid and
diverse changes also present opportunities. For example, a growing
communications and telemetry infrastructure can provide
planners with the data and control to develop cost-optimal reliable
power systems and give them increased access to distribution-sited
assets to more efficiently operate those systems.
The Control Room of the Future Research Program (Table 4)
figure 2. The control room of the future and that of
the past (inset). (Source: National Renewable Energy
Laboratory; used with permission.)
50
ieee power & energy magazine
focuses on the development of new technologies and approaches
for enhanced real-time visibility and analysis in power system
operators' control rooms. Topics include the accuracy of wind/
solar forecasts, ramping forecasts, and forecasts of net load that
properly account for DERs (distributed solar, electric vehicles,
demand response, distributed storage, and so on). Other topics
are operational strategies to increase the efficiency of network
capacity, such as dynamic line rating, the coordination of critical
maintenance outages, and the management of environmental
threats (e.g., fires, floods, and hurricanes).
november/december 2021
IEEE Power & Energy Magazine - November/December 2021

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