TOWARD A SUSTAINABLE, SMARTER POWER GRID: IN SEARCH OF EFFECTIVE PERFORMANCE MEASURES, EVALUATION SCHEMES, AND RELATED POLICY

摘要

The North American electrical grid is a subject of frequent discussion in national defense and, more recently, sustainability circles. Cascading outages in the Northeast in 2003, and the Southwest in 2011, highlighted the vulnerabilities in the system. It is estimated that one of these large blackout events cost the U.S. economy six billion dollars, excluding qualitative costs to the general public (hospital patients, elevator riders, et cetera). This paper looks at some of the underlying barriers to effective system management. Barriers include the lack of standardized performance measures, complex organizational, revenue, and policy structures, and conflicting interests of government and private power generation and distribution entities. Whereas the power industry deregulation in the 90s has yielded conflicting economic outcomes, in terms of reliability, it is clear that the frequency of occurrence for large disruptive events is not decreasing. There is also the challenge of highly stochastic renewable energy sources, which improve system-wide sustainability, but increase the overall stress and uncertainty in the system. We apply the balanced scorecard methodology to identify preliminary alternatives for performance measurement, effective policy and organizational management of the existing power grid, and plans for future development.