| Five Application Domains - Energy management |
 |
 |
 |
Page 3 of 6
Energy management
The electrical power grid, in India, has remained unchanged for a few decades. It is a hierarchical, centrally-controlled structure that assumes that power is generated solely from large central facilities, that power is abundant, and that power generation is relatively benign. Stability is attained through redundancies and highly controllable generation that reacts to problems such as demand fluctuations and outages, rather than anticipating and avoiding them. A number of significant developments have upended the assumptions under which the current grid was designed. Demand has risen sharply, and will continue to do so. With high rates of economic growth and over 15 percent of the world’s population, India has become a significant consumer of energy resources. In 2006, India had 144 gigawatts (GW) of installed electric capacity and generated 703 billion kilowatt hours. Nearly all power in India is generated with conventional thermal sources, which produced over 80 percent of electricity in 2006. Hydroelectricity has been a consistent source of power in India, accounting for nearly 16 percent of power generated in 2006. Finally, nuclear energy produced roughly 2 percent of electricity during the same year, while geothermal and other renewable sources accounted for as little as 1 percent.
The main challenge is to design an innovative suite of real time capabilities for detecting and preventing instabilities and outages and a state-of-the-art framework for analyzing and designing the smart grid and associated distributed control network. In general, the problems associated with modern smart grid can be categorized as follows; Energy management — Due to introduction of renewable based energy sources, the uncertainty in generation is higher. Hence, the forecasting source availability is a challenging problem. Depending up on forecast, the sources need to be scheduled. Load scheduling instead of load shedding is a primary task of energy manager. Stochastic estimation will play a key role in the algorithm development. Grid Design — Techniques of multi-objective optimization are required for tradeoffs between competing objectives, such as cost, size and stability. Grid Control — Grid can be thought as a distributed sensor network. Grid control must consider multiple time scaling issues. Grid Regulation — Regulation are needed to ensure an electricity market that is both efficient and resistant to manipulation, while preserving the grid reliability
There are tremendous challenges / opportunities for both Industry and academic communities to address India’s growing energy demand and also to address the issues of power grid modernization which has great societal impact. The distributed control & communication technologies have a significant role to play in realizing this opportunity.
All these challenges are also very relevant for Europe. Recent technological advances in European energy distribution have triggered the interest of other partners throughout the world including the United States and the Asian countries. Strengthening the links between Europe and India, which is one of the main purposes of EUCLID, will certainly foster the transmission of European knowhow to India. Opening this fast growing market to the European utilities is of strategic and commercial importance.
|
