ESIC FA20 Seminar Series ~ Enabling power grid resiliency: Tools for operators and cognitive analysis
About the event
Energy Systems Innovation Center and Advanced Grid Institute presents Enabling Power Grid Resiliency: Tools for Operators and Cognitive Analysis by Eric Andersen, Aditya Ashok, & Anurag Srivastava
Overview
The growing complexity of electric power infrastructure, along with disruptions from natural and human causes, are threatening reliability. These threats include increasingly frequent severe weather events, deliberate physical attacks, and cyber-attacks on the grid and its monitoring systems. Efficient decision making in extreme event scenarios depends on two factors: appropriate decision support tools and operator knowledge acquired through training and experience. Control rooms are an environment of highly mixed human-computer control and decision making. Operators are inundated with data and information and can be stretched to the limits of their cognitive performance, particularly when decisions need to be made under great time pressure. This talk aims to introduce grid resiliency, situational awareness, decision support tools using machine learning, power engineering analysis. The talk will also briefly introduce a simulated control room environment that will be used to recreate relevant real-world use cases similar to the Ukraine cyberattacks and NERC GridEx exercises to evaluate and validate the effectiveness of the developed decision support tools in providing actionable information for enhancing situational awareness, as well as in aiding operator decision making by considering cognitive factors into account.
Bios
Mr. Andersen has been with PNNL for over 30 years. He is the Team Lead for PNNL’s Grid Operations Research Team, managing a team of power systems engineers with skills in electric grid operations and planning, and realistic grid operations simulation testbeds. He serves as PNNL’s Electricity Infrastructure Operations Center (EIOC) manager, with a focus on enabling cutting edge grid operations research in a world-class control room research environment. Mr. Andersen is a graduate of Washington State University, a Project Management Institute (PMI) certified Project Management Professional (PMP) and IEEE member.
Dr. Aditya Ashok is a senior research engineer in the Electricity Infrastructure and Buildings division at the PNNL and has been with PNNL since February 2016. Aditya received his doctoral degree in Electrical Engineering from Iowa State University (2017). Aditya’s research interests include analyzing cyber vulnerabilities in energy delivery systems, assessing potential impacts to system operations, reliability, and economics, and developing novel algorithms to mitigate cyber vulnerabilities and enhance the overall security and resilience of energy delivery systems.
Dr. Anurag K. Srivastava is an associate professor of electric power engineering at Washington State University and the director of the Smart Grid Demonstration and Research Investigation Lab (SGDRIL) within the Energy System Innovation Center (ESIC) and holds a joint appointment as a Senior Scientist with the Pacific Northwest National Lab (PNNL). His research interest includes data-driven algorithms for power system operation and control including resiliency analysis. He is vice-chair of the IEEE Power & Energy Society’s (PES) of power system operation SC, vice-chair of tools for power grid resilience TF and member of CIGRE C4.47/ C2.25 Resilience WG. He is author of more than 300 technical publications including a book on power system security and four patents.