IEEE Power & Energy Magazine - January/February 2016 - 118

Practical Power Systems
Operation
By Ebrahim Vaahedi
i must admit, when i was asked to review
Practical Power Systems Operation by dr.
ebrahim vaahedi, i initially felt a sense of
both excitement and curiosity. i was excited
because of the word "practical" in the title
and curious because i wanted to know how
we could connect the practical aspects of
power system operation with the detailed
technical and algorithmic concepts that go
into power system operation solutions.
in the beginning, readers are treated
with the book's foreword piece written by Martin huang, bC hydro's vice
president of Grid operation. he starts by
relating to his own engineering education
and how other textbooks were not suited
to tackle practical problems. he then describes this book as "classical electrical
engineering theories meet everyday power system operation." reviewing the conDigital Object Identifier 10.1109/MPE.2015.2487199
Date of publication: 30 December 2015

tents of the book, i am pleased to learn
that the book has been adopted by the bC
hydro operator training program as part
of the material provided to trainees.
The first chapter provides a canvas of
the history of power system operation.
The author stresses that power system operation is manifested by three actors: operators, operation processes, and the technology. This is exactly where the book
distinguishes itself from competing books
in power systems, which often focus on
the technology. This chapter continues
with the fundamentals of power system
operations and describes the North american electric reliability Corporation's
(NerC's) power system operation criteria, operation standards, and processes.
Chapters 2-8 lead the reader on a
new journey to power system operation
with each chapter focusing on one major
NerC operation process. each chapter
expounds power system operators' tasks,
operation processes that help operators
execute the designated tasks, and technol-

ogy solutions that enable and facilitate the
listed processes.
Consider Chapter 2, which discusses
"NerC's Monitoring Process," identified as
the most important operation process. The
chapter starts by providing a background on
why operators would need to monitor the
power system followed by a discussion on
control center procedures that are developed
to support the operators with implementing
assigned functions. The chapter ends with
detailing two technology solution architectures, supervisory control and data acquisition (sCada) and state estimation, which
are deployed to facilitate and enable the
system monitoring process. Chapters 3-8
follow the same rhythm for describing the
major operation processes in control centers
and their enabling technologies:
✔ Chapter 3-process: scenario
analysis; technology: sCada and
power flow
✔ Chapter 4-process: posturing
for static security; technology:
contingency analysis

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Power & Energy Magazine - January/February 2016