Program: November 3, 2020

General Session

8:00 a.m.−noon

 

Moderator: Will Lovelace

Co-Moderators: Al Haman, Dave Bisel, Ryan Bergeron

 

Welcome and Opening Remarks

Will Lovelace, Minnkota Power Cooperative

 

Moving Energy at the Speed of Light

Edmund Schweitzer III, Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories, Inc.

Our industry thrives because we deliver safe, reliable, and economical energy at the speed of light and at the flick of a switch. Our commodity, electric power, travels 186 miles in a millisecond! No other commodity moves this fast. It’s this speed that has made aggregation of load and intermittent sources possible and enabled less generation to serve more customers. How can we continue to build on this important first principle, to further increase the value of electricity? We’ll look at a few first principles and consider ideas for today, tomorrow, and the future.

 

Grid Reliability and Its Vital Signs

Jessica Bian, Grid-X Partners, LLC

What is driving our industry to improve performance with every technology employed, every trend established, and every standard implemented? Learn grid reliability vital signs and best practices for COVID-19 responses across the global power and energy sector, including impacts and mitigation measures.

 

Accelerating a Low-Impact Energy Future

Joe Fargione, The Nature Conservancy

While investment in renewable energy offers growth opportunities across the Midwest, renewables development also requires significant land conversion. We will discuss how energy projects can impact land conservation and climate and explore potential strategies for maximizing the conservation benefits of project siting, design, and management.

 

Engineering Ethics

Justin Weinberg, Taft Law

Today or tomorrow, big or small, personally or professionally, everyone encounters a time when ethics enters into the equation of reaction and decision making. In this one-hour course, attendees will review five commonly encountered ethical dilemmas and their appropriate solutions.

Concurrent Sessions

1:00−4:30 p.m.

SUBSTATION

Moderator: Neil Stiller

Co-Moderators: Brianna Swenson, Steve Mohs

 

IEEE 998-2013 Guide for Direct Lightning Stroke Shielding of Substations

Martin Havelka, nVent ERICO

This presentation will cover the methods and theory behind the placement of apparatus to protect substations from direct lightning strokes. It will also describe the apparatus in detail.

 

Power System Studies for Solar and Wind Farms

Ahmad Abdullah and Curtis Roe, Mortenson Engineering Services, Inc.

This presentation will cover the optimal design of the main power transformer when considering the interconnection requirements. We will also address the sizing of surge arresters and neutral grounding reactors in the substation in relation to the collection system cable concentric neutrals.

 

Key Attributes of Xcel Energy's Transmission Asset Health Analytics (TAHA) Program

Alan Lundberg, Xcel Energy

Xcel Energy's transmission assets are evaluated through an analytics methodology. The TAHA program assigns numerical values to each asset, based on many analytical factors, to determine the asset's condition, preventive maintenance prioritization, basis for repair/replace decision-making, and target replacement date. This presentation will discuss the program, how it has evolved, and future plans for it.

 

The History and Significance of the Carbon Oxide Ratio for Power Transformers

Randy Cox, GE Grid Solutions

This presentation will describe a new method for the interpretation of the Carbon Dioxide/Carbon Monoxide ratio as it relates to transformer dissolved gas analysis.

METERING

Moderator: Dan Nordell

Co-Moderators: Tom Guttormson, Pete Malamen

Metering presents a panel session built around the theme of “Edge Intelligence,” sometimes called “Distributed Intelligence.” Imagine what could be achieved if the communication overheads of conventional centralized analytics could be reduced through the use of what we might call a “Supercomputer in the Meter.” Presentations in this session begin with the discussion of Use Cases as seen by utility practitioners Brian Amundson and Roopesh Aggarwal of Xcel Energy as they describe both utility-facing and customer- facing benefits of applying distributed intelligence inside the meter. The second presentation, from Ed Beroset of EPRI, is provocatively entitled “You Don’t Have to Have a PhD to Use Machine Learning!” and explores opportunities for distributed intelligence from a research perspective. Finally, the last two speakers present real opportunities from their experience with providing edge intelligence. Mike Phillips from Sense has a background in speech recognition and has applied that experience to the development of effective load disaggregation techniques that might be implemented in electricity meters. Finally, Tim Driscoll from Itron will describe practical distributed intelligence applications for electricity meters.

The panelists and their topics are as follows:

 

Electric Utility Use Cases for Edge Intelligence

Brian Amundson and Roopesh Aggarwal, Xcel Energy

 

You Don’t Have to Have a PhD to Use Machine Learning!

Ed Beroset, EPRI

 

Data from the Edge: Consumer and Grid Benefits

Mike Phillips, Sense

 

Driving Intelligence to the Edge of the Distribution Grid: Meter-Based Distributed Intelligence

Tim Driscoll, Itron

TRANSMISSION 

Moderator: Mike Steckelberg

Co-Moderators: Michael Marz, Douglas Brown

 

MISO Study on the System-Wide Impacts of Electrification

Hilary Brown and Aditya Jayam Prabhakar, MISO

MISO will present work examining the impacts of electrification on MISO seasonal load shapes, required capacity expansion, and accommodating increased electrification as increasing levels of energy are provided by renewables.

 

The Future of North Dakota Transmission Capacity

Tom Butz and Peter Koegel, Power System Engineering, Inc.

This study analyzed the effects of GI Queues, TEPs, and load growth on existing transmission capacity in North Dakota. Storage options and pricing data were evaluated over varying levels of wind development.

 

NERC SPIDERWG: Addressing impacts of Distributed Generation

Kun Zhu, MISO

NERC has established the System Planning Impacts of Distributed Energy Resources Working Group (SPIDERWG) to address the reliability impacts of distributed generation. This presentation will provide updates on the products the working group is delivering.

 

Energy Storage as a Transmission Asset in MISO

Randy Johanning, American Transmission Company

ATC’s Waupaca Area battery project is MISO’s first storage as a transmission asset project (ISD December 2021). This presentation discusses the considerations addressed to implement storage as a transmission asset in MISO.

RELAYING I

Moderator: Dave Bisel

Co-Moderators: Ryan Bergeron, Michael Ebert

 

Transmission Line Protection for Systems with Inverter-Based Resources

Normann Fischer, Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories, Inc.

In this paper, we provide application guidance to set conventional line protection schemes reliably in systems with inverter-based resources (IBRs). The guidance is based on a study performed as part of a collaborative effort by NERC, Sandia National Laboratories, four IBR manufacturers, and two relay manufacturers.

 

Recent Utility Experience with High Impedance Fault Detection

Thaddeus (TJ) Potter, PEPCO

This paper summarizes almost a year of observation of the performance of several hundred downed conductor detection relays on the PEPCO system. The paper details the number and type of downed conductors that were detected as well as failure to detect, misoperations, and identified upgrades to enhance relay security.

 

Impact of Voltage Transients and System Impedance Ratio on Zone 1 Distance Relay Reach

Pratap Mysore, Pratap Consulting Services, LLC; John Berzins, Xcel Energy

The paper discusses the impact of CVT transients and SIR on underreaching distance elements and methods to reduce voltage transient errors through better designs or with better CVTs available now.

 

Automatic File Retrieval and Reporting

George Chirco, GE Renewable Energy

Valuable data files exist in IEDs, and the most efficient and secure means of obtaining those files is automatically, without human intervention. This paper addresses automatically and securely retrieving nonoperational IED files and forwarding them to a remote server.