Perspectives on Future Power System Control Centers for Energy Transition

Abstract

Today's power systems are seeing a paradigm shift under the energy transition, sparkled by the electrification of demand, digitalisation of systems, and an increasing share of decarbonated power generation. Most of these changes have a direct impact on their control centers, forcing them to handle weather-based energy resources, new interconnections with neighbouring transmission networks, more markets, active distribution networks, micro-grids, and greater amounts of available data. Unfortunately, these changes have translated during the past decade to small, incremental changes, mostly centered on hardware, software, and human factors. We assert that more transformative changes are needed, especially regarding humancentered design approaches, to enable control room operators to manage the future power system. This paper discusses the evolution of operators towards continuous operation planners, monitoring complex time horizons thanks to adequate real-time automation. Reviewing upcoming challenges as well as emerging technologies for power systems, we present our vision of a new evolutionary architecture for control centers, both at backend and frontend levels. We propose a unified hypervision scheme based on structured decision-making concepts, providing operators with proactive, collaborative, and effective decision support.