Architecting the Grid Edge: Ensuring Reliability and Resilience

Abstract

Changes in technology, customer expectations, and business and regulatory environments are rapidly evolving causing fundamental changes in the nation’s electrical infrastructure. Nowhere is this more apparent that at the “grid edge”, where there is an increasing number of new devices and systems, as well as complex new interactions between them. This is leading to the traditional relationship between the end-use customers and their utilities being expanded by an increasing number of stakeholders, each with their own operational and financial objectives, governed by regulatory policy. While there are concerns about the rapidly increasing complexity negatively impacting reliable and resilience of the electrical infrastructure, these changes are also bringing new resources and opportunities that hold great potential if they can be properly coordinated. This white paper outlines the considerations for the coordination of multi-stakeholder objectives with electric utility requirements using the concept of grid services. Describing a framework that enables new stakeholders to achieve their local technical and economic objectives, while simultaneously delivering operational benefits to the electrical infrastructure. The concepts of grid architecture are presented as a tool to evaluate how stakeholders might participate in, and benefit from, services, and how utilities can make decision on the reliance on services to ensure reliability and resilience, translating abstract concepts into actionable information for utilities and grid edge stakeholders. The end result of proper coordination, informed by grid architecture, will be a range of new devices and systems, operated by new stakeholders, achieving their local objectives while also increasing the reliability, resilience, security, and affordability of the nation’s critical electrical infrastructure.