IEEE Power & Energy Magazine - September/October 2014 - 14

density and load factor than traditional
"office loads." they employ significantly
fewer people and interact less with the
local economies. this requires, in addition to renewable resource forecasting,
new energy load and market price forecasting approaches and tools.
Furthermore, demand-side management is a step toward delivering differentiated value of service quality to end
users. With this business model, users
pay for the reliability, power quality,
and overall service they want. this will
require different business and regulatory models than what we have today.
however, present expectations by end
users are to get reliable and inexpensive power, so changing this model will
not be easy.

Major Aspects
Let's look at some major aspects of our
industry.

Aging Infrastructure
although the age of the infrastructure
(particularly underground city networks)
is a major issue, it should not be viewed
as an issue that has to be treated on its own
merit. instead, industry focus should be on
the holistic asset-management approach
to address grid resilience including relative risks and economics of maintenance,
repair, and replacement or retirement for
various elements of the physical infrastructure. this holistic approach requires viewing the utility fleet of capital equipment as
critical strategic assets impacted by key
interrelated areas in support for business
goals: aging infrastructure (including condition monitoring and assessment tools),
grid hardening (weather-related response,
physical vulnerability, and cybersecurity),
and system capabilities and characteristics
(including improving reliability metrics,
such as saidi and saiFi, and managing systemwide outages). integrating an

asset-management approach structured
around these focal areas and interacting
with spending and resource decisions is
needed to best achieve optimal cost-effective solutions. an additional aspect requiring new processes and tools is managing
new smart grid assets such as aMi and
intelligent electronic devices.

Physical Vulnerability
the risk assessment and characterization
effort will need to look to possible future
events based on historical data and other
potential risks such as a physical attack.
While it is not possible to predict when
and where future events will occur, it is
possible to identify the substations and
lines in the system that, as a result of
their location, configuration, and electrical characteristics, pose the greatest risk
for large-scale outages. these results
can then be used to tailor grid-resiliency
efforts to focus on those facilities with the

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Power & Energy Magazine - September/October 2014