The IEEE Power & Energy Society, Industry Technical Support Leadership Committee (ITS LC) has published a new white paper “Resilience Framework, Methods, and Metrics for the Electricity Sector”, developed by a Task Force chaired by Bill Chiu. This document, prepared in collaboration with DOE and initiated by  Shay Bahramirad, IEEE PES VP of New Initiatives, helps frame, inform, and identify activities to enhance power system resilience. Quanta Technology is pleased to have contributed to this industry-wide initiative.   Damir Novosel, (report co-author, ITS LC chair, and Quanta Technology president) quotes, “Our industry has been looking for a structured and holistic way to define resilience and a framework to organize and communicate how metrics, tools, and methods can be used to improve it.  Our team of diverse industry leaders and experts has completed this task on a fast-track in four months. The COVID-19 pandemic has served as a stark reminder to society at large of the essential nature of the electric power industry and the importance of grid resilience for a decarbonized energy future.”   Julio Romero Aguero, (report co-author, upcoming IEEE PES VP of Membership and Image, and Quanta Technology VP of Strategy and Business Innovation) states “This publication comes at a time of significant changes for the utility industry, including integrating large-scale variable renewable resources, electrical energy storage, and rapid electrification. Increasingly common and extreme weather events are also occurring in parallel with the adoption of these new technologies. This important work will help the electric industry to evolve from reliability as a singular system performance metric to a system characteristic whereby the electric grid has the ability to withstand and recover from any disruptive event.”   Website Link: https://resourcecenter.ieee-pes.org/publications/technical-reports/PES_TP_TR83_ITSLC_102920.html?utm_source=social&utm_medium=linkedin&utm_campaign=tr83-reslience-framework

Energy Storage Best Practices: Engineering & Deployment Farid Katiraei, Quanta Technology, LLC  Shadi Chuangpishit, Quanta Technology, LLC Registration: https://events.omicronenergy.com/website/1534/

Opening Session- Julio Romero Aguero Plenary Session 2, Success Factors for Resilient and Decarbonized Grid- Damir Novosel Presentation- Hugo Gil This year’s theme for the Twelfth Conference on Innovative Smart Grid Technologies (ISGT 2021) is “Technology Solutions for an Evolving Grid”, sponsored by the IEEE Power & Energy Society (PES). It will be held virtually February 16-18, 2021 Eastern Standard Time.   Registration: https://ieee-isgt.org/

Coordinated Resource T&D Planning and Operation Towards Investment Prioritization Panelists: Stephen Teran & Dr. Hisham Othman. Description: Well established planning and operational processes in the electricity industry are often siloed and are being challenged in the face of significant technology migration and ambitious decarbonization and resilience policies to mitigate climate change challenges.  Integrated resource planning (IRP) , T&D planning, grid modernization, and risk mitigation require coordination and cross optimization to achieve the prevailing policies.  Increasingly, investments are interchangeable and/or interdependent across the electricity value chain.  A case in point is system resilience being addressed by investments in T&D assets and by customer-sited microgrids. Investment planning that optimizes across policy objectives will require closer coordination across planning and operational processes. This webinar will identify key areas of necessary convergence and explore their current status and perceived gaps. It will further discuss technical, organizational, and regulatory barriers to convergence and will propose solutions to guide the development of a roadmap towards greater coordination and integration.  Key areas of focus will include integrated T&D planning (including non-wire alternatives), resilience planning, asset management, short- and long-term forecasting, protection and control, coordinated energy storage across T&D systems, and T&D operation centers. Event Link: https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/1685746349735108364  

Wide Area Protection Coordination (WAPC) Studies provide a comprehensive review of coordination for a selected region or the entire transmission network of a utility.  Leveraging automation, these studies focus on coordination aspects of the protective relays for line, transformer, or bus faults, in a detailed manner in a relatively short period of time compared to traditional methods of coordination analysis. Each line study considers a wide range of fault types, fault locations, and system contingencies which needs to be tailored to a particular utility. Given the large scope of such studies, the results obtained can be overwhelming for an engineer to analyze.  Hence, it is essential to post-process the results and efficiently highlight the most critical issues to be addressed by the engineer. A WAPC study provides an effective approach to detect latent issues to improve reliability and highlight issues in preparation for the PRC-027 standard requirements.  The webinar will describe the WAPC process, illustrate some typical results, and highlight the utility benefits. Who should attend: Protection Engineers, Compliance Managers Quanta Technology Panelists: Majida Malki & Jorge Velez ConEdison Panelist: Hibourahima Camara Event Link: https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/6129220284934013709

Texas A&M Conference for Protective Relay Engineers Two Quanta Presented Papers: “Application and Integration of Automation-Based Tools for Efficient and Accurate Modeling of Transmission System Protection” Daixi Li, Tim Chang, Saman Alaeddini, Guanhua Wen, Xinyang Dong, Quanta Technology“Utilities are increasingly looking towards simulation-based protection evaluation capabilities within short-circuit software to assist their engineers in meeting the requirements of emerging compliance standards and performance metrics. Automated protection modeling can be a solution to the complexities of creating and maintaining accurate protection representation on these software platforms.This presentation discusses the practical challenges and considerations associated with the implementation and utilization of these automated protection modeling methodologies, including aspects of data preparation, day-to-day operation, and long-term governance. The real-world experiences presented in this session draw from four utilities across the United States, each with different practices, conventions, and preferences.” “Process Improvement of Distribution Protective Relays Coordination” Mehrdad Chapariha, Mohamed Maria, Saman Alaeddini, Quanta Technology   Presentation Title Process Improvement of Distribution Protective Relays Coordination (March 25) Abstract: This paper discusses the improvement of protection settings reviews performed by protection engineers in utilities regularly. It highlights common process inefficiencies, shows the improved deployment of data sources and proper use of software tools, and demonstrates filling gaps with automated routines. The rapid expansion of renewable energy resources and evolving regulatory requirements have increased the demand for these studies and necessitated a quicker turn-around time. The paper presents three practical examples implemented in a real power network. The solution presented in this paper results in considerable time savings and forms one of the major building blocks for adaptive protective schemes in the future. Authors Mehrdad Chapariha (Presenter) , Mohamed Maria, and Saman Alaeddini (Quanta Technology) Miguel A. Vazquez, Arthur Giourdjian (Presenter), and Gurinder Gill (San Diego Gas and Electric®)    

Our Keynote Speaker is Dr. Shay Bahramirad, Vice President, Climate & Resilience at Quanta Technology. Globally recognized as an industry leader that is passionate in defining the next horizon of the electric utility industry – as evidenced by media mentions in industry, business, and mainstream channels; primary author of white papers; speaker at industry conferences; and holder of 4 U.S. patents. Passionate about mitigating climate change and driving social equity. Shay was most recently Vice President, Engineering and Smart Grid at ComEd in Chicago.  With all of the changes happening in our industry, this is a Keynote Address you won’t want to miss! This event is truly unique in our industry because it brings together all of the leading manufacturers for reclosers and recloser controls along with the “who’s who” from utilities to share their experiences and knowledge in reclosers, testing, and distribution automation. NETA CTDs: Attend this seminar and have the opportunity to earn 6.5 NETA CTDs (Continuing Technical Development Credits).   www.omicronenergy.com/recloser

NASPI Work Group Virtual Meeting The North American Synchrophasor Initiative (NASPI) Work Group Virtual Meeting will be April 13-15, 2021. Please join us for three full days featuring technical sessions and presentations discussing • high-resolution sensors characterizing the transient behavior of inverter-based resources and other fast-acting phenomena, • using measurement to enhance the accuracy of inverter-based resource models, • statistical analysis and deep learning for extracting actional information for large datasets, • advanced distribution system applications. April 14, 2021 Session #5 Time:2:25-2:40pm Session: WECC Synchrophasor Data Exchange – Panelist: Dan Brancaccio (Quanta Technology) Date: April 15, 2021 Session #8 Time: 2:20-2:35pm Session: IEEE PES-TR74: Panelists: Yi Hu & Ken Martin Session #10 Time: 4:00pm-4:10pm Session: Distribution Synchronized Measurements Technology Deployment Roadmap Panelists: Julio Romero Aguero (Quanta Technology)/Lingwei Zhan (ORNL)

“Proliferation of Renewables and Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) and FERC order 2222 are strongly driving business cases for DERMS deployments. This webinar presents a crosscut of the DERMS deployment and integration challenges following experience and lessons learned from recent DERMS implementation projects. The presenters discuss these issues by way of three utility implementations: • DERMS deployed in a specific region to address issues with several Front of Meter DERs to mitigate impact on a substation, • An enterprise-level DERMS scaled across the entire utility service territory, selected subsequent to performing multiple pilot projects, • DERMS as Aggregator of Aggregators with a primary focus on managing several third-party resources and aggregators. Key discussion points are: • Functional specifications based on unique system characteristics, • Compatibility with a given utility IT/OT environment, • Alignment with existing or planned advancement of distribution management systems (DMS).” Quanta Technology Panelist: Farid Katiraei, Chad Abbey, Shadi Chuangpishit Entergy Panelist: Samrat Datta Registration Link: https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/8326567885391867918

May Webinar- Practical Implementation of Engineering Automation for Protection and Control Utilities have increasingly turned to the digital transformation of processes and data to address the challenges brought on by emerging new technologies, increased regulatory requirements, and an aging workforce, and to optimize the efficiency and capabilities of their engineering departments. This webinar presents the innovative engineering automation program undertaken by a major west coast utility’s Protection and Control department to integrate software-based automation techniques for system-wide analysis, reporting, compliance, and safety applications. This discussion will include considerations for holistic data management, technical requirements, and strategies for transitioning the engineering team to the utilization of automation-based processes. The real-world experience of employing these automation, integration, and data management solutions at San Diego Gas & Electric provides one potential implementation for the successful digital transformation of data and processes to assist protection engineers in meeting the challenges of the modern power systems industry. Who should attend: Protection engineers, Compliance managers, Data management specialists Quanta Technology Panelists: Saman Alaeddini San Diego Gas & Electric: Chris Bolton May 20, 2021- 11am-12pm EDT https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/2144010705081717519