This quarterly newsletter highlights recent projects, partnerships, and resources from the G-PST Consortium.

Letter from the Chair of the Founding System Operators

Creating Cleaner Power Systems through International Collaboration

As a global society, it has never been more important for us to transform how we power our lives and communities. The issue of decarbonizing the energy sector is not one for future generations to solve, but one that leaders around the world must urgently address today. However, as higher penetrations of variable renewable energy are brought online, the world’s electricity system operators are faced with an unprecedented amount of technical and operational challenges to ensure power systems remain secure, reliable, and resilient.

This is where the Global Power System Transformation (G-PST) Consortium endeavors to make an impact.

Through collaboration between several founding system operators and a core technical team of leading research institutes, the G-PST Consortium seeks to accelerate the integration of increasing volumes of renewables onto the world’s power systems while supporting the system operators on the ground facing daily operational constraints. We aim to provide this support through cutting-edge research as well as knowledge diffusion to help other jurisdictions and system operators embrace – and successfully manage – more and more clean power.

I would like to thank the many leaders from our core team, system operator partners, and other key organizations who set the G-PST Consortium on track to make significant progress toward our goals this first year. We are excited to release this inaugural newsletter and begin working with stakeholders worldwide to create a cleaner, more affordable energy future.

Fintan Slye
Chair of the Founding System Operators of the G-PST Consortium
Executive Director, Electricity System Operator, U.K.

Technical Highlight

Inaugural Research and Teaching Agendas Released

The G-PST Consortium released two distinct agendas – a Research Agenda developed by Pillar 1 and a Teaching Agenda developed by Pillar 3 – that establish the consortium’s research and educational priorities.

The Research Agenda summarizes the outputs from a consultation process that captures the consensus-based research needs of a group of the world’s leading system operators necessary for the highest levels of renewable integration. These research areas will inform critical power sector research and development investments. The Research Advisory Group will continue adding value to aligned research efforts already underway over the next six months.

The Teaching Agenda is a ‘forward-looking’ teaching and training agenda that would prepare university graduates and upskill current power engineering professionals to meet the challenges posed by very high penetrations of variable renewable energy (VRE) sources and inverter-based resources (IBR) in power systems. As power systems are evolving rapidly, the current research priorities outlined in the Research Agenda will need to be moved to adoption quickly and therefore become topics where teaching and training is needed. With this in mind, the research questions set out in the Research Agenda are directly relevant to the Teaching Agenda. We welcome feedback and questions on both documents.

Review the complete agendas:

Country Spotlight

G-PST Consortium Supports Indonesia’s Power System Operator with Control Room Upgrades

The G-PST Consortium, in partnership with the Asian Development Bank, is providing technical assistance to Indonesia’s state-owned utility, PLN, in support of their Java-Bali system control center upgrades. The G-PST Consortium team is collaborating with PLN and its consultants to provide technical input on the control center procurement process and to ensure the Java-Bali control room will be equipped for significant renewable energy scale up.

The PLN-UIP2B Control Center in Java-Bali.

PLN and the G-PST Consortium also hosted a kick-off webinar in April 2021 for the System Operator Forum Power System Sharing Series. The kick-off session featured an introduction to the System Operator Forum, the G-PST Consortium, and a technical portion comprised of insights from CAISO, the Electricity Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), NREL, and the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) about lessons learned from past system upgrade initiatives, comprehensive control room design architecture, and challenges related to operating the control rooms of the future. Watch the full webinar at: Industry and Researcher Perspectives on Control Center Upgrade Procurement. The second webinar in the series, held in early May 2021, focused on SCADA/EMS readiness for high penetrations of VRE. Watch the second webinar at: The Readiness of SCADA/EMS in Control Center for VRE Integration.

Over the coming months, future Sharing Series topics will address key challenges facing PLN as it aims to ensure its grid system operations are proactively prepared to transition to low-carbon operating regimes.

Resources

Learning Opportunities:

Peer Learning in Southeast Asia: We Want to Hear from You!

The G-PST Consortium is joining forces with the Asia Low Emission Development Strategies (LEDS) Partnership to support peer learning in the Southeast Asia region on advanced, low-carbon operational and engineering solutions to support power system transformation and high penetrations of VRE.

We would like to determine your interest in engaging with peer learning topics in Southeast Asia. As a first step, if you are interested in engaging in this peer learning opportunity, please fill out our quick survey so we can tailor peer learning to your needs and interests. Thank you!

G-PST Consortium Southeast Asia Peer Learning Survey

Upcoming Events:

Pillar 1 Webinar: Survey of Grid-Forming Inverter Applications – June 9, 2021 at 4 p.m. EDT

Grid-forming technology is viewed as one of the necessary enablers for high penetration of IBRs. This webinar will provide an overview of existing and ongoing projects, focusing on the drivers behind the choice of technology and project performance. The webinar is based on the whitepaper “The Role of Grid Forming Technology to Enable Energy Systems Integration” on which the Energy Systems Integration Group’s (ESIG’s) High Share of IBRs Task Force is currently working. Register for the webinar.

The G-PST Consortium at Enlit Africa – Session: Bringing Renewables onto the National Grid – June 9, 2021 at 8:30 a.m. EDT

The G-PST Consortium is excited to participate in the 2021 Enlit Africa festival. Our session will include a moderated discussion with experts from the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), NREL, and South Africa’s public utility, Eskom, about the work of the G-PST Consortium and insights into opportunities for collaboration with African utilities. Register for the session.

Past Events:

Explore the complete library of our webinars on our YouTube channel or our Resources web page.

Quick Bits

Learn about upcoming G-PST Consortium events, activities, participation opportunities and more by visiting our Get Involved web page or following us on LinkedIn or Twitter. Feel free to reach out to our team any time at globalpst@nrel.gov.