Carnegie Mellon Electricity Industry Center

Events

Fifth Annual Carnegie Mellon Conference on the Electricity Industry: SMART GRIDS, March 10-11, 2009, Tepper School of Business, Carnegie Mellon University
http://www.ece.cmu.edu/~electriconf/

Fourth Annual Carnegie Mellon Conference on the Electricity Industry:
FUTURE ENERGY SYSTEMS: EFFICIENCY, SECURITY, CONTROL, March 10-11, 2008, Tepper School of Business, Carnegie Mellon University.
http://www.ece.cmu.edu/~electriconf/2008/index.html

Third Annual Carnegie Mellon Conference on the Electricity Industry:
Ensuring that the Industry Has the Physical and Human Resources Needed for the Next Thirty Years, March 13-14, 2007, Tepper School of Business, Carnegie Mellon University.
http://www.ece.cmu.edu/~electricityconference/2007/

Monitoring, Sensing, Software and Its Valuation for the Changing Electric Power Industry, January 11-12, 2006, Tepper School of Business, Carnegie Mellon University.
http://www.ece.cmu.edu/~electricityconference/Old06/

This conference focuses on the software aspects of transmission. While there has been general recognition that transmission needs to be upgraded, the emphasis has been on hardware. We think that much can be done to improve the system through better sensing and computer control.

Papers focus on innovative ways of increasing the capacity or reliability of the grid with little investment in hardware and consider technical and/or economic policy enhancements necessary to support penetration of the most promising technologies.

Electricity Transmission in Deregulated Markets: Challenges, Opportunities, and Necessary R&D Agenda, December 15-16, 2004, Tepper School of Business, Carnegie Mellon University
http://www.ece.cmu.edu/%7Eelectriconf/old2004/

This conference focuses on the current problems in and possible solutions for getting electricity from generators to customers. Restructuring the electricity industry has made transmission no one’s problem – and thus everyone’s problem. We examine issues associated with ownership and control of transmission, managing current congestion, eliciting sufficient investment in system upgrades, introducing new technology, and prioritizing and paying for needed R&D. We will hear from leaders in industry, government, and academia from engineering, economics, and regulatory policy communities. The presentations and discussions will aim at providing practical ideas that can be implemented immediately, recognizing that a multi-disciplinary approach is needed to make progress in handling transmission problems so critical to the success of our economy. During the conference we will:

Lay out the transmission problems for the 21st century, including protecting the system from terrorists, increasing reliability, obtaining renewable power from remote locations, managing distributed generation, and the meeting the challenges of restructuring.
Survey theoretical approaches to the problems and identify difficult unsolved aspects of these problems;
Outline current industry practices and the need for changes;
Share various novel approaches to posing, analyzing, and solving multi-disciplinary problems facing this industry;
Examine economic and financial opportunities and barriers to change;
Stress the role of information/software in supporting the evolution of working industry architectures toward provable enhanced industry performance;
Revisit monitoring, analysis, and control methods in light of the changing industry;
Draft a white paper based on the conference findings, outlining a roadmap for multidisciplinary R&D and supporting multi-disciplinary education programs.

CECA Forum
http://www.cecarf.org/index.html

CEIC is providing research support for the The Energy Security and Electric Industry Restructuring Forum organized by the Consumer Energy Council of America (CECA). Over the past 30 years, CECA has held forums designed to bring together stakeholders interested in an issue of importance to energy consumers and develop, over the course of a year’s worth of meetings, a ‘consensus report’ outlining the issues and presenting CECA’s position.

CEIC has been invited to participate in Energy Modeling Forum (EMF) 20: "Fuel Diversity, Natural Gas and North American Energy Markets."
http://www.stanford.edu/group/EMF/home/index.htm

The EMF was established in 1976 to provide a structured forum within which energy experts from government, industry, universities, and other research organizations could meet to study important energy and environmental issues of common interest. Previous EMFs have produced widely-cited research, which has appeared in books, special reports, and peer-reviewed literature. The electricity industry is key to EMF 20 because almost all demand growth in North American natural gas markets is expected to come from power generation, while at the same time there are serious concerns about the price and physical availability of gas to serve the electricity industry. Several electricity industry companies are participating in EMF 20, including Southern Company and Tractabel.

A Workshop on Electricity Security and Survivability. November 28-29, 2001 Carnegie Mellon University
Details

The terrorist attacks of September 11 highlighted the problem of international terrorism and raised new concerns about the vulnerability of large, industrial systems to attack. The electric power system is particularly vulnerable because it is so widely distributed that it is essentially indefensible. It is vulnerable to cyber as well as conventional attack since the systems that operate it on a second-by-second basis as well as plan operations for the next several days (e.g. power markets) generally consist of distributed communication and computation networks. Further, electric power system must balance supply and demand at every instant, so modest disruptions in key locations can have major effects systemwide. A workshop hosted by the Carnegie Mellon Electricity Industry Center, with the support of the Carnegie Bosch Institute, discussed ongoing and needed research into electric power system security and survivability.