Future Power System Architectures: Global Insights | Session 2

WEBINAR DETAILS:

Tuesday, November 17, 2020 at 2:00pm-3:00pm PST

Speakers:

Phil Lawton, Energy Systems Catapult UK

Moderated by Mark Paterson, Chief Strategy Officer at Strategen

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Decarbonization and decentralization are driving levels of systemic complexity in global electricity systems that are unprecedented. The transformation of Australia’s electricity systems to very high levels of Variable Renewable Energy (VRE) and Distributed Energy Resources (DER) is considered world-leading and already presenting challenges never faced elsewhere.

In this increasingly dynamic future, bulk energy, transmission and distribution systems will need to evolve to function in a more systemic or whole-of-system manner, irrespective of the actual industry structure in any given jurisdiction.

Given this transformational context, the United States, United Kingdom, European Union and Canada have efforts underway to ensure their power system architectures are adapted to safely and cost-effectively accommodate an increasingly decarbonized future. While Australia has no current equivalent, a key focus of such projects is to identify the minimum structural changes required to maximize a system’s ability to transition – at least cost – to a lower carbon, increasingly decentralized and more customer-centric future.

The well-established Systems Architecture discipline provides the basis for objectively and systematically evaluating the most impactful and cost-effective structural enhancements of a highly complex system.  Beyond a singular focus on IT architecture, applied to power systems it enables the holistic and simultaneous interrogation of the following four highly interdependent functional layers of the electricity system.

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