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Creating a Sustainable Society

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Sustainable Energy Engineering

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Reformulation-Based Approaches to Query Optimization

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Computer Vision and Image Analysis in the Study of Art

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Skewed functional processes and their applications

Challenges and Opportunities in the New Transmission Business

The rapid and wide-ranging changes in electricity restructuring have profoundly impacted all sectors of the power industry. The most profound changes, by far, have come to the critically important transmission sector. These changes affect all aspects of power system operations and planning, the structural organization of the sector, the design of markets, the economics of transmission investments and the formulation of appropriate regulatory policy. Such changes represent tremendous new opportunities for innovative problem solving and development of effective tools to lead to the removal of impediments to vibrant competitive markets. At the same time, an incontrovertible conclusion of the mega-blackout of August 14, 2003 is the fact that the transmission network is the weakest link of the restructured electricity business in the United States. The findings and recommendations in the Final Report of the U.S. -- Canada Power System Outage Task Force present the daunting challenges faced in ensuring the reliability of the huge interconnected North American grid.

In this presentation, we review some of the major challenges and opportunities in the evolving transmission business. In the short term, the physical constraints in the power transmission system are making it difficult to realize the potential economic benefits of restructuring. The advances of the current research on economically efficient congestion management and financial transmission rights that correctly accommodate the physical usage and market liquidity are discussed. In the longer term, the major issues focus on the need for incentives in investment in infrastructural components, the role of reliability, the improvement of system security and the effective integration of distributed energy resources (small local generation sources and demand participation). The discussion will describe some of the key challenges and the needs for interdisciplinary approaches due to the nature of the problems. The requirements on the training of the new generation of power system engineers to effectively address these challenges will also be covered.

George Gross is Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Professor, Institute of Government and Public Affairs, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  His research and teaching activities are in the areas of power system analysis, economics and operations, utility regulatory policy and industry restructuring.  He was formerly with the Pacific Gas and Electric Company, where, Dr. Gross founded the company's Management Science Department and held other key management, technical and policy positions. During 1992-93, Dr. Gross was at the Electric Research Power Institute to develop research directions on open access transmission. A Fellow of IEEE, Dr. Gross was also awarded the Franz Edelman Management Science Achievement Award by the Institute of Management Science. Prof. Gross is the author of a large number of publications and book chapters. He was a Visiting Professor at the Politecnico di Milano, University of Pavia and the Politecnico di Torino during the academic year 1999 – 2000.

Dr. Gross has consulted on electricity issues with utilities, government organizations and research institutions in North America, Europe, South America, Asia and Australia. He has lectured widely and has given presentations at leading universities and research institutions throughout the world.