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2009 EMS Users Conference
DRAFT AGENDA

The Nines Hotel, Portland, Oregon
Sunday, Sept 13, 2009 - Wednesday, Sept 16, 2009
Sunday Sept 13
19:00 - 21:00
 Welcome Reception Hospitality Suite
Monday Sept 14
07:00 – 08:00
 Continental Breakfast & Registration
08:00 – 08:15
 Welcome and Conference Review
08:15 – 08:45
 Keynote – Eric Whitley, Director, EMS and IT Services, WECC
08:45 – 09:30
 State Estimator Implementation at PacifiCorp: Challenges and Experience – Dr. Peng Li, PacifiCorp
09:30 – 10:15
 New Ideas in Synchronized Phasor Measurement Communications and Applications - Ralph Mackiewicz, SISCO, Inc.
10:15 – 10:30
Break
10:30 – 11:15
 Austin Energy’s Smart Grid Project – Reza Alaghehband, Austin Energy
11:15 – 12:00
 Integration of Synchro-Phaser Measurements in Power Systems State Estimation for Enhanced Power System Reliability – Hassan Ghoudjehbaklou Ph.D. & Gary Roskos, Open Systems International, Inc.
12:00 – 13:00
 Lunch
13:00 – 13:45
 Security Focus Group – Richard White, AREVA
13:45 – 14:30
 Vision for Future Control Centers – Khosrow Moslehi, ABB
14:30 – 14:45
 Break
14:45 – 15:30
Are you collecting the right data for the NERC auditors? - Walter Sikora, Vice President, Security Solutions, Industrial Defender
15:30 – 16:15
Data center centralization and operation via virtual hosted workstations leads to performance improvement and hardware location independence – Hydro Quebec and Jules Bocarro, SNC-Lavalin T&D, Inc.
16:15 – 16:25
 EMS User Conference Board and Committee Introductions
16:25 – 16:45
Vendor Introductions
17:00 - 21:00
 Vendor Demos (Hors d'oeuvres and bar served until 19:00)
Tuesday Sept 15
07:00 - 08:00
Continental Breakfast
08:00 – 08:45
What to expect preparing for CIP audit – Kevin Perry, Critical Infrastructure Protection, SPP
08:45 – 09:30
CIM Standards: Status, Testing and Collaboration – Randy Rhodes, PacifiCorp
09:30 – 09:45
Break
09:45 – 10:30

The Industry View on Smart Grid: How Smart Grid Choices Will Affect Market Operations and Technology - Chris Russo, CRAI

10:30 – 11:15
Network Applications for Otter Tail Power with Lower Voltage Network – Les Jarriel, Power Software and Consulting
11:15 – 11:55
Panel Discussion and Roundtable – Open to all questions and topics
11:55 – 12:00
 Closing Remarks and Meeting Adjourned
12:00 – 13:00
 Lunch
13:15 – 17:00
 Concurrent sessions (Tour and Training)
Tour: WECC Control Center Tour
 Training: The Utility of the Future – Will McNamara and John Holt, KEMA, Inc.
Wednesday Sept 16
07:00 – 08:00
Continental Breakfast
08:15 – 12:00

Concurrent sessions (Tour and Training)
Tour: WECC Control Center Tour
Training: Expert Operator Decision Making – Robin Podmore, IncSys; Robert Eubank, WECC; Greg Lange, Grant County PUD and Dr. Frank L. Greitzer, PNNL


Presentation Abstract:
State Estimator Implementation at PacifiCorp: Challenges and Experience – Dr. Peng Li, PacifiCorp

PacifiCorp is managing around 11,000 MW of load throughout the northwest region. To support the grid operations and grid reliability is not an easy task. PacifiCorp just completed its State Estimation (SE) development on the EMS system in Nov 2008. Since then, it has been running smoothly in the production with 99.5% valid solutions. This presentation will cover the processes and issues about power system model development and the maintenance. It will also share the experience during SE implementation and tuning. Finally, it will discuss the SE applications and challenges.

New Ideas in Synchronized Phasor Measurement Communications and Applications – Ralph Mackiewicz, SISCO, Inc.

Previous projects and pilots have confirmed the importance of synchronized phasor measurements as a tool for improving grid stability. These projects have also identified that improvements in communications, integration and applications are needed. New industry wide efforts like NASPInet and US government stimulus funding have created opportunities for new approaches to be tested and evaluated. This paper will describe several of these new approaches by providing an overview of current NASPInet activities and describing some stimulus project proposals made by grid operators and utilities.

Integration of Synchro-Phaser Measurements in Power Systems State Estimation for Enhanced Power System Reliability – Hassan Ghoudjehbaklou Ph.D. & Gary Roskos, Open Systems International, Inc.

Synchro-Phasor measurement units (PMUs) have major impacts on Power System Network observability and solutions accuracy. PMUs are finding more and more applications in Smart Grids and Power Systems Automation. They help provide more accurate solutions for the networks that will be of benefits to many applications, thus enhancing power systems reliability. This presentation focuses on practical aspects of utilization of PMUs in State Estimation (SE) models. Even though the existence of a single angle measurement eliminates the need for selecting the reference bus in the SE formulation, it has an adverse impact on the convergence and accuracy of the estimates in the unobservable and boundary regions. The effect of PMUs on observability and options to enhance convergence are discussed. Also, the critical issue of bad angle measurements, their effects on the convergence and solution accuracy, and their identification and removal are addressed.

Security Focus Group – Richard White, AREVA

AREVA T&D launched a customer Security Focus Group in mid-2007, and has been hosting and facilitated the group now for over 2 years. The Security Focus Group has grown to include over 55 customer participants, representing more than 25 customer companies. This presentation will give an overview of the approach and objectives of the Security Focus Group, and will highlight some of the group's activities and achievements over the past two years.

Vision for Future Control Centers – Khosrow Moslehi, ABB

Smart grid initiatives, among other things, are expected to improve power system reliability. The social and economic cost of power system failures can add up to billions of dollars each year. The need for more robust and intelligent control capabilities is accentuated by high volatility and low operating margins driven by deregulation, integration of renewables and other dispersed resources, etc. The benefits of preventing/containing disturbances and mitigating grid congestion provide the financial justification for an intelligent infrastructure that can support a smarter grid. The advances in relevant technologies present an opportunity to fulfill this vision. A conceptual design to realize this vision through a distributed IT infrastructure is presented. The underlying architecture allows autonomous intelligent functional agents at various hierarchical levels of the control system to act wherever and whenever necessary. Power system operating concerns are addressed by the orchestration of intelligent control actions by the functional agents over the entire temporal spectrum from milliseconds to operational planning time frames.

Are you collecting the right data for the NERC auditors? - Walter Sikora, Vice President, Security Solutions, Industrial Defender

NERC CIP compliance is here now and entities that fall into NERC’s implementation table 1 are suppose to be ‘auditably compliant’ by June 30, 2010! With the potential of one million dollars per violation per day, utilities cannot assume that they are collecting the right data. What does that mean? Means that entities will need to demonstrate and attest with twelve months of evidence that they have command and control of their critical cyber assets. What kind of data is required? What’s the format? How does one attest to the information? Many entities do not realize the importance of collecting the information required for the audit. Not only is the data important, entities have to prove that they have reviewed the information. How are utilities dealing with the millions of event records from their critical cyber assets? Many are not, because the task is daunting and putting one’s head in the sand is not going to get you through the audit! In this paper we will present the NERC audit compliance attestation artifacts required from your electronic security perimeter devices, your critical cyber SCADA/Energy Management systems, and your critical substations. You will learn what type of information is required and you will learn effective ways to gather, analyze and report on it. More importantly you will learn what to look for in your organization and to make certain your company is collecting the right information.

Data center centralization and operation via virtual hosted workstations leads to performance improvement and hardware location independence – Hydro Quebec & Jules Bocarro, SNC-Lavalin T&D

Hydro-Québec TransEnergie owns and operates the complete Quebec HV transmission network. As most utilities, especially in these tough economic times, HQ is striving to reduce its operational costs. Among potential cost reduction measures, HQ looked at restructuring their operations from seven independent regional control centers to two data center locations, serving the seven control centers through hosted virtual desktop technology. Cost reductions with this approach are expected by centralizing hardware and software maintenance. Independent control centers require maintenance intervention on each server/workstation machine one at a time – a lengthy process with an “unavailability” cost to the user. Centralization optimizes the maintenance effort without sacrificing performance. As a bonus benefit, it also improves system security by restricting access to the computer facilities, the end-user computer being in fact, a "dumb terminal".

This task is to determine the feasibility of this approach and validate the expected benefits, selecting the most appropriate technology to deploy this centralized architecture, with performance and reliability as key criteria.

A prototyping study identified the best options and returns given the available technologies and their requirements in terms of inter-site telecommunications. A mock-up site with representative hardware, software and data was established to benchmark the results and assist in the analysis and recommendations. Based on the results, the Citrix™ platform was chosen. The Citrix™ technology itself presented some challenges in the areas of user interface and performance, which required “tweeking” and some software development in the area of UI. While there were some limitations, there is overall measurable benefit to the organization in terms of operation performance, reduction of hardware, maintenance time reduction, and cyber-security.

The implementation of Citrix™ technology has enabled Hydro Québec to rationalize their maintenance operations, ultimately at three sites ideally located in urban areas allowing access to suppliers and resources. Implementation of this technology has resulted in new applications and operation methodologies which will further optimize network operations resulting in overall business performance improvement.

What to expect preparing for CIP audit – Kevin Perry, Director, Critical Infrastructure Protection, Southwest Power Pool Regional Entity

Balancing Authorities, Transmission Operators, Transmission Service Providers, and Reliability Coordinators are now required to be fully compliant with all of the NERC Reliability Standards CIP-002-1 through CIP-009-1. At the end of the year, Interchange Authorities, Transmission Owners, Generation Owners, Generation Operators, and Load Serving Entities will reach the full compliance date. Spot check audits are already underway. This presentation will help you be ready for the auditor’s visit, informing you of what the audit team will expect and how you can be prepared for their arrival.

For a little lagniappe, this presentation will also present an overview of the Technical Feasibility Exception process and an update of where the CIP standards development efforts are heading.

CIM Standards: Status, Testing and Collaboration – Randy Rhodes, Gartner, Inc.

An increasing number of vendors and utilities are leaning on Common Information Model (CIM) standards to manage integration needs. This presentation reviews extensions available in the current CIM version and previews developments in 2009 and 2010 including an overview of recent and upcoming interoperability tests. Current challenges to standards development are considered, along with various ways utilities can contribute to CIM development.

The Industry View on Smart Grid: How Smart Grid Choices Will Affect Market Operations and Technology – Chris Russo, CRAI

The vocabulary of the Smart Grid is focused on interoperability, but who is assuring operability? That is, where is the market for operability and how will it function? A survey of the Smart Grid landscape reveals that those questions remain conspicuously underconsidered. This might be due to sheer neglect, or perhaps a bold assumption that the market will simply emerge when needed. That approach cannot continue.

For the Smart Grid to meet the various visions attached to it, a vibrant market is needed between supply and demand. This is not currently the case, and has resulted in Smart Grid investment only taking place at a handful of forward-looking utilities (and only now by the firehose of federal stimulus spending). But the mutually beneficial exchange between energy supplier and consumer will be the ultimate — and sustaining — enabler.

One of the most important questions is how (and whether) customer pricing will be included in the Smart Grid – many people can’t imagine the Smart Grid without pricing, and just as many can’t imagine it with it. We’ll take a look at how customer pricing and other policy decisions may affect markets, as well as how these choices will affect technology on the market software level. Impacts will undoubtedly be far-reaching and large, but depend to a great extent on the choices implemented in different regions.

Network Applications for Otter Tail Power with Lower Voltage Network – Les Jarriel, Power Software and Consulting

The presentation will demonstrate the project of implementing a Network Applications package for Otter Tail Power. Some cost concerns and concerns about the State Estimator stability on a lower voltage network with limited telemetry required OTP to evaluate all options how to proceed with this project. Finally, with modifications to their existing State Estimator, OTP was able to implement a successful State Estimator and Network Analysis package to satisfy the needs of a sub-transmission operator and utility. The delivery included new technology called Virtual Real-Time Measurements Technology which was used to Extend Observability into Internal Non-telemetry Islands.

Training: The Utility of the Future – Will McNamara and John Holt, KEMA

Smart Grid-UoF Trends
  • What is the Smart Grid vision?
  • What does the grid need to become “smart” or “intelligent”?
  • Market trends
    • Variances among Smart Grid infrastructures
    • Standards components defining Smart Grid
    • Smart technologies associated with the Smart Grid
  • Utility best practices
    • Duke Energy
    • Oncor
    • California utilities
  • Vendor best practices for HAN (KEMA does not endorse any specific vendor)
    • Tendril
    • Gridpoint
    • Positive Energy
    • EnergyHub
  • Operational characteristics of the Smart Grid
    • End to end operational views (e.g., Power delivery, front end, back end, T&D, distributed resources, customers)
    • How Gen, Trans, Dist and Metering work together? To deliver the end-to-end value chain
    • Leading Smart Grid technology considerations
  • What issues need to be resolved for successful integration of the Smart Grid?
    • Policies and regulation
    • Standards and interoperability
    • Quality and security
    HOW GENERATION, TRANSMISSION, AND DISTRIBUTION WORK TOGETHER IN A SMART GRID SCENARIO

  • Generation:
    • Plant automation
  • Transmission
    • Substation automation
    • Relay coordination
    • Sensors
    • Coordinated action at Control Centers
  • Distribution
    • Distribution automation (feeder-load balancing, capacitor switching, restoration)
    • Advanced metering

    NEXT GENERATION EMS AND CONTROL CENTERS
  • Trends in the future of EMS
  • CIGRE D2.24 (EMS of the Future) Working Group update
  • Impact of NERC Real-time Best Practices Task Force
  • Impact of increasing amounts of renewables on the grid
  • Situation awareness enhanced by synchro-phasor measurements / phasor measurement units (PMUs)
  • Integration with microgrids
  • Regional application / linkages among control centers

    THE IMPACT OF RENEWABLES (wind, solar, DG, microgrids, etc.) ON OPERATIONS—Will McNamara and John Holt
  • Current market stats / market trends for renewables
  • Coupling renewables with storage technologies (batteries, flywheels)
  • Microgrids
  • Technology trends: micro hydro installations, solar panels, gas microturbines)
  • Use of digital monitoring, switching, and relays (Distribution side)
  • Direct interconnection of large-scale resources into the network / remote sensing to improve flow management (Transmission side)
  • Interconnection standards (e.g., IEEE 1547)

    SECURING THE SMART GRID
  • New approaches to upgrading sensors for complete and greater depth in monitoring and diagnostics of physical and cyber events.
  • Need for coordinated approach among all sectors on issues such as developing reporting thresholds, response and recovery plans, information sharing, and incident reporting mechanisms.
  • NIST proposed Smart Grid Interoperability standards
  • DOE activities (e.g., SCADA Test Bed program)
  • NERC CIP standards

    Training: Expert Operator Decision Making – Robin Podmore, IncSys; Robert Eubank, WECC; Greg Lange, Grant County PUD and Dr. Frank L. Greitzer, PNNL

    What is an Expert?

    Development of the Expert Operator Decision Model (ODM)
      Naturalistic Decision Making
      Power System Cues
      Developing Situation Awareness by building a complete and consistent Story
      Evaluating Action Scripts
      ODM illustrations with PowerSimulator
    Applications for Developing and Implementing Simulator Scenarios
      NERC PER 005 simulation requirements
      Learning Objectives
      Simulator Modes
    Application of the Expert Operator Decision Model for Developing and Evaluating EMS User Interfaces
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