What a difference a decade makes. In the mid-to-late 90s, BPA's research and development budget shrank to virtually nothing. Today, BPA has re-emerged as a regional and national thought leader. The change came from the realization that the market-will-take-care-of-everything attitude of the 1990s was not necessarily accurate.

But those years took a toll. As an industry, says Terry Oliver, "we are behind in understanding and applying technology. We have a tremendous need to sail closer to the wind and very few tools that allow us to do that."

A Map to the Future

It is part of Oliver's job to bring those needed tools to life. BPA's renewed R&D effort started with a very disciplined planning effort. That planning took 18 months and included contributions from more than 80 internal experts. The result was a detailed path forward in each of four essential areas:

§       Energy Efficiency

§       Physical Security

§       Renewable Energy

§       Transmission

"We started with the business challenges," explains Oliver. "Then we asked which technologies could provide solutions." That filter immediately reduced the number of technologies to be considered "because if they don’t relate to our business, they're not on the list."

At that point, BPA performed gap analysis to determine where to prioritize its research efforts and its on-the-ground pilots. You can download PDF versions of the four roadmaps at the BPA Technology Innovation Web page linked at the end of this article.

Three Key Trends

Now that Oliver is past the initial planning, he sees at least three central issues: intermittency, interaction, and immediacy.

Intermittency. The major challenge in the renewables area is the intermittency of renewables such as wind. When BPA first set out to investigate how to integrate 6,000MW of wind into its system, some experts thought it would be virtually impossible.

Fortunately, early results show the problem is "not as bad as we feared." BPA is discovering that diversity – diversity within individual wind farms and between different farms – can dissipate many wind ramping issues. BPA also believes it can use the region's hydroelectric system and future load management programs to help solve the intermittency challenge.

Interaction. Since the 1990s, BPA has espoused the concept of the Energy Web. As the nearby picture illustrates, the Energy Web envisions a day when intelligent devices all across the value chain – generation, delivery, end use – communicate and interact to optimize the system.

Terry Oliver has coined the word "interactability" to describe the ability of devices to work together seamlessly. It is this "interactability" that allows such things as demand response programs to act as a spinning reserve. Equipment that doesn't have this feature will increasingly be isolated.

Immediacy and Interpretation. BPA is a leader in several research efforts to use Wide Area Measurement Systems and phasor-grade data. Today, says Oliver, such data is used to determine the cause of past problems (if it is used at all). The next challenge is to use it to actively manage the grid.

There are at least two major hurdles to getting immediate, real-time information about a large grid. The first is computational speed for things such as state estimation. "One of our experts compares the current situation to driving a sports car in a nighttime road rally with the lights shining backwards," reports Oliver. "We've got to increase the speed of state estimation because forward visibility would be extremely helpful."

The second hurdle is figuring out how to interpret, visualize and present dense data so human operators can spot the critical information. The challenge is so perplexing that one utility software company has gone so far as give grants to a university to see if video game programmers can help to imagine better grid controls for the future.

Two Surprises

In addition to the technology trends outlined above, Terry Oliver cautions utilities to be aware of two potential surprises. The first is the growing power of the new reliability rules. "As reliability reports appear, as utilities are penalized for not meeting standards, some of their R&D will shift towards avoiding the fines, penalties and bad PR."

The second possible surprise, he says, is the emerging importance of standards. "There is an overlooked message in what BPA is doing," he warns. "We are following the interoperability guidelines now appearing from the GridWise Architecture Council." Those guidelines are beginning to influence BPA's research agenda and its purchasing plans. Utilities that are not staying up with emerging standards could end up buying "dead-end" equipment that cannot easily interoperate with the rest of the world.

Terry Oliver is the Chief Technology Innovation Officer of the Bonneville Power Administration. Headquartered in Portland, OR, BPA is a federal agency that markets wholesale electricity and transmission to Northwest utilities (and to some large industries). It provides about half the region's electricity and operates about three-fourths of its high-voltage transmission (15,000 miles and 300 substations).

   BPA's Technology Innovation Web page

   Email Terry Oliver