IEEE Power & Energy Magazine - January/February 2016 - 57

Comprehensive multilateral adoption of the CIM, such
as was accomplished at ERCOT and by ENTSO-E in Europe,
is where the largest payoff occurs.
these agreements, tsos cooperated in a variety of procedures
for system security, capacity calculation, and outage planning.
since 2007, however, a number of regional security cooperation initiatives have been launched as a response to a
large system disturbance in 2006.
due to the increased importance of coordinated business
processes for capacity calculations, outage planning, and grid
security calculation, the need for common grid models (cgMs)
and for other merged grid scenarios has been defined. understanding this, the eNtso-e system operations committee in
april 2012 assigned its regional group central europe subgroup on Network Models and Forecast tools to "suggest a
procedure and responsibilities for delivering and updating the
common grid Models with their importance for operations and
capacity calculation." subsequently, a task force was established
for the preparation of a technical specification.
in 2013, after carefully assessing the available european
and international standards for their fitness to support the
identified business requirements, eNtso-e approved the
common grid Model exchange standard, which specifies
european network analysis procedures layered on the iec
tc57 ciM international standards for network modeling.
the design eNtso-e will use is illustrated in Figure 6. the
left side shows that individual tsos (41 within eNtso-e) will
prepare their individual ciM-based grid models for the required
time horizons, in which they incorporate future projects,
planned outages, load forecast, generation schedules (based on
market models or on actual market results), seasonal limits, and
applicable set points. after passing a centralized quality gate,
the net positions and flows on high-voltage dc interconnectors
are matched to target values, resulting from either market clearing (day-ahead and intraday) or from an interchange-matching
algorithm that was developed as part of the project.
the next step is assembling the submitted model parts
and creating a power-flow solution for the entire pan-european grid for each required point in time. the information
that is exchanged for this cgM is expressed as ciM sv and
tp model parts, which refer to the ciM eQ models already
available on the european operational planning data
environment (a system eNtso-e is developing to realize
the exchanges needed for the business processes discussed
earlier). the solved system states can be used to initialize a
power-flow tool to the state of any cross-section of the european power systems, enabling regional studies, examples of
which are listed on the right in Figure 6.

january/february 2016

the modular design of the processes enables the european
tsos to satisfy business needs from network planning (long-term
processes analyzing competing projects) to operational planning,
while minimizing the overhead in data exchange. without ciMbased exchange profiles, this would not be feasible for a constellation of 41 tsos covering five different synchronous areas.

Conclusion
the development of ciM standards for network analysis is
continuing in working group 13, but it has reached the point
where the cost/benefit case for adoption is compelling. the
ciM can reduce cost, it can speed up complex processes, it
can reduce the potential for errors, and it can free valuable
engineering time to do analysis rather than data management.
comprehensive multilateral adoption of the ciM, such as
was accomplished at ercot and by eNtso-e in europe, is
where the largest payoff occurs. of course, this requires collaboration among many parties and so can introduce political
as well as technical challenges. epri, however, has also shown
in its work how a utility may benefit from unilateral adoption of
the ciM, concentrating on unifying the various case-building
activities within the utility's operations and planning responsibilities. this latter, of course, becomes a stepping stone toward
multilateral adoption, which is easier as more individual participants in the grid have already adopted the ciM.

For Further Reading
Using the Common Information Model for Network Analysis Data Management: A CIM Primer Series Guide, epri,
palo alto, ca, 2014.
operational network codes and market guidelines as
a result of the 3rd energy package of the european union.
[online]. available: http://networkcodes.entsoe.eu/
Network Model Manager Technical Market Requirements: The Transmission Perspective, epri, palo alto,
ca, 2014.

Biographies
Jay Britton is with britton consulting, seattle, washington.
Pat Brown is with the electric power research institute, palo alto, california.
John Moseley is with the electric reliability council of
texas, taylor.
Miloš Bunda is with bunda beheer, arnhem, the Netherlands.
p&e

ieee power & energy magazine

http://networkcodes.entsoe.eu/

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