ASME Columbia Basin Section: A Society of Devices: Coordinating Flexible Energy Usage at Scale

Description

Our connected world offers us greater ease of access to information, goods, and services. In 2001, PNNL started the Energy Systems Transformation Initiative, which placed our imprint on what became referred to as the smart grid vision. The most transformational aspect of the vision was the coordinated operation of millions of customer energy consuming and producing equipment with the rest of the electricity system. The key innovation was decentralized energy management of buildings and energy-related processes. This distributed decision-making approach uses market-based interactions to continually balance supply and demand of the system. At the time, a reporter called this transactive energy, and it stuck. Since those early years, decarbonization goals have pushed electrification to the policy forefront along with large penetration of variable renewable generation that challenges system operation. This talk reviews the nature and challenges of transactive energy and its implications for coordination of energy and business processes in general. Presented by Steve Widergren, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. Steve contributes to new solutions for reliable operation of electric power systems. He is a past member of the board and Plenary Chair for the Smart Grid Interoperability Panel (now SEPA) and was also the founding administrator for the GridWise® Architecture Council – both groups formed with the mission to enable interoperability of automated systems related to the electric system. Steve participates in standards efforts that bridge power engineering with information technology.