Smart Grid: Communication-Enabled Intelligence for the Electric Power Grid

12

State Estimation and Stability

The killer app that got the world ready for appliances was the light bulb. So the light bulb is what wired the world. And they weren’t thinking about appliances when they wired the world. They were really thinking about – they weren’t putting electricity into the home. They were putting lighting into the home.

— Jeff Bezos

12.1 Introduction

This is the second chapter of Part Three, which focuses upon state estimation and stability within the power system. Both of these aspects fall under the concept of controls; namely, correctly estimating the state of the system being controlled and making sure that the controller is programmed to respond in a manner that keeps the output of the system at the desired value when perturbations occur. These same aspects of control theory also apply in communication systems; for example, state estimation is used in estimating the quality of a communication channel and stability is critical in keeping traffic flowing smoothly via access control mechanisms. A significant component of the smart grid is the integration of communication. A particularly challenging aspect is using communication for control within the power grid. This is known as networked control. It is challenging because remotely controlling a system using a communication network can introduce variable delay into the control system, thus making it challenging to respond appropriately to a rapidly changing physical system such as the power grid. We introduce ...