Dr. Eugene Litvinov
Dr. Eugene Litvinov is a Senior Director of Business Architecture and Technology at the ISO New England. He is responsible for advanced System and Markets solutions, Smart Grid and Technology strategy and is a lead of the Research and Development activities in the organization. He has more than 35 years of professional experience in the area of Power System modeling, analysis and operation; Electricity Markets design, implementation and operation; Information Technology. Dr. Litvinov has extensive expertise in management and technical leadership of large engineering and information technology projects; development of computational methods in power system analysis and operation; market clearing engines and electricity pricing; settlements.
Dr. Litvinov holds BS, MS and PhD in Electrical Engineering. He is an editor of the IEEE Transactions on Power Systems and former chairman of the Power System Engineering Research Center (PSERC) industry advisory board.
“Architecting the Future Power Grid”
Smart grid technologies could dramatically alter the architecture of the existing power grid. One prominent feature of the smart grid is the unprecedented level of uncertainty brought by variable resources, such as wind and solar, responsive demand assisted with the Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI). Another salient feature of the future grid is the increasing variety and level of distributed resources, e.g., combined heat and power, photovoltaic arrays, electric vehicles, storage, etc. These resources will be located in the distribution system, but will function at the transmission level through virtual power plants, aggregators or micro grids. This high level of uncertainty (not only in value, but spatial as well) will require significantly more flexibility in system balancing mechanisms, which, in turn, may lead to comparatively higher reliance on corrective actions and wide area Protection System, new smart grid technologies like storage, EVs, DR, etc. The tradeoff between preventive and corrective control measures will change. Such higher need for flexibility will lead to different electricity market designs, allowing for cleaner financial only forward markets. The complexity of such system can easily grow beyond control and lead to unexpected phenomena and undesired emergent behavior. New ways of formalizing complexity and quantifying resilience are desperately needed. This will help developing policies limiting the complexity to preserve controllability and observability of the system.
Future Grid will in turn require more flexible grid architecture. Design and operation of such system has to be built on the principles of survivability – instead of trying to eliminate blackouts (which is an impossible task), the system has to be able to contain the disturbances minimizing the impact on the operation. The very concept of reliability may have to be analyzed and updated to accommodate the distributed nature of future power systems. New control concepts and infrastructure has to be developed to accommodate new requirements.