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Abstract The active distribution network (ADN) can obtain measurement data, estimate system states, and control distributed energy resources (DERs) and flexible loads to ensure voltage stability. However, the ADN is more vulnerable to cyber attacks due to the recent wave of digitization and automation efforts. In this article, false data injection (FDI) attacks are focused on and they are classified into two types, that is, type I attacks on measurement data and type II attacks on control commands. After studying the impact of these two FDI attacks on the ADN, a new threat is revealed called coordinated FDI attack, which can maximize the voltage deviation by coordinating type I and type II FDI attacks. From the attacker's perspective, the scheme of CFDI is proposed and an algorithm is developed to find the optimal attack strategy. The feasibility of CFDI attacks has been validated on a smart distribution testbed. Moreover, simulation results on an ADN benchmark have demonstrated that CFDI attacks could cause remarkable voltage deviation that may deteriorate the stability of the distribution network. Moreover, the impact of CFDI attacks is higher than pure type I or type II attacks. To mitigate the threat, some countermeasures against CFDI attacks are also proposed.

California has set ambitious decarbonization goals concerning both emissions and the portion of energy generated by renewable resources. However, climate change poses considerable uncertainties. Variation in load is driven both by the level of electrification as well as the impact of climate change on weather. Further, climate change stands to make weather more variable, impacting not just load but generation from renewable resources. In this paper, we approach the issue of the impacts of climate change on decarbonization planning from two perspectives. First, we look at the range of decarbonization pathways through 8 pathways that account for differences in socioeconomic development, global emissions, and warming. Second, we develop a more robust way of ensuring the reliability of energy resources planning than the commonly used planning reserve margin. We show that the proposed method can save between 6 and 14 billion dollars in investment and maintenance costs and outline critical policy implications concerning the reliance of power plants for satisfying planning reliability requirements, including the potential retirement of dozens of peaker power plants.

Unit commitment (UC) is a fundamental problem in the day-ahead electricity market, and it is critical to solve UC problems efficiently. Mathematical optimization techniques like dynamic programming, Lagrangian relaxation, and mixed-integer quadratic programming (MIQP) are commonly adopted for UC problems. However, the calculation time of these methods increases at an exponential rate with the number of generators and energy resources, which is still the main bottleneck in the industry. Recent advances in artificial intelligence have demonstrated the capability of reinforcement learning (RL) to solve UC problems. Unfortunately, the existing research on solving UC problems with RL suffers from the curse of dimensionality when the size of UC problems grows. To deal with these problems, we propose an optimization method-assisted ensemble deep reinforcement learning algorithm, where UC problems are formulated as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) and solved by multi-step deep Q-learning in an ensemble framework. The proposed algorithm establishes a candidate action set by solving tailored optimization problems to ensure relatively high performance and the satisfaction of operational constraints. Numerical studies on three test systems show that our algorithm outperforms the baseline RL algorithm in terms of computation efficiency and operation cost. By employing the output of our proposed algorithm as a warm start, the MIQP technique can achieve further reductions in operational costs. Furthermore, the proposed algorithm shows strong generalization capacity under unforeseen operational conditions.

This paper develops a forecasting-based missing value replacement model for Phasor Measurement Unit (PMU) data during power system events. The proposed forecasting model leverages a sequence-to-sequence (Seq2Seq) long short-term memory (LSTM) network with an attention mechanism, which is trained with both pre-event and post-event data. The trained forecasting model is utilized to accurately estimate and recover missing measurements in PMU data. To improve the accuracy of the proposed model, we introduced two novel techniques: 1) integrating a prior knowledge matrix into the attention mechanism that effectively preserves correlations within PMU data, and 2) decoupling the magnitude and trend components of the residual forecast so that such forecasting models are separately trained, which boosts the resistance to the noisy signal. Numerical studies on real-world PMU data collected from the North American electric power grid demonstrate that our proposed model achieves 5% to 30% error reduction compare to the baseline models for all key power grid measurements in both root mean square error and mean absolute error metrics. Furthermore, our model exhibits robust missing data recovery performance even when nearly all of the grid event data is missing.

The grid reinforcement, advanced grid stabilizing systems, and inverter-interfaced loads have varied power system dynamics. The changing trends of various dynamic phenomena need to be scrutinized to ensure future grid reliability. A dynamic behavior-based event signature library of phasor measurement unit (PMU) data has great potential to discover new and unprecedented event signatures. This paper presents an event signature library design that further defines more granular event categories within the major event categories (e.g., frequency, voltage, and oscillation events) provided by electric utilities and regional transmission organizations. The proposed library design embraces a supervised machine learning approach with a deep neural network (DNN) model and manually-generated labels. The input of the model uses representative PMUs that evidently express dominant event signatures. The performance of the event categorization module was evaluated, via information entropy, against labels generated automatically from clustering analyses. We applied the event signature library design to two years of over 1000 actual events in the bulk U.S. power system. The module obtains remarkable event discrimination capability.

Renewable energy production has been surging around the world in recent years. To mitigate the increasing uncertainty and intermittency of the renewable generation, proactive demand response algorithms and programs are proposed and developed to further improve the utilization of load flexibility and increase the efficiency of power system operation. One of the biggest challenges to efficient control and operation of demand response resources is how to forecast the baseline electricity consumption and estimate the load impact from demand response resources accurately. In this paper, we propose a mixed effect segmented regression model and a new robust estimate for forecasting the baseline electricity consumption in Southern California, USA, by combining the ideas of random effect regression model, segmented regression model, and the least trimmed squares estimate. Since the log-likelihood of the considered model is not differentiable at breakpoints, we propose a new backfitting algorithm to estimate the unknown parameters. The estimation performance of the new estimation procedure has been demonstrated with both simulation studies and the real data application for the electric load baseline forecasting in Southern California.

Smoke produced by wildfires is usually visible much earlier than flames. Hence, early detection of wildfire smoke is essential to prevent severe property losses and heavy casualties from catastrophic wildfires. Camera networks are being built and expanded to achieve timely wildfire smoke detection. To achieve the best camera coverage and detection accuracy with limited budget, an intelligent video smoke detection algorithm and an optimal wildfire camera placement strategy are in a critical need. In this paper, we propose an efficient video smoke detection framework designed for embedded applications on local cameras. It consists of two modules. In the first module, the original video frames are processed by local binary patterns and a dense optical flow estimator. In the second module, the produced features are then fed into a lightweight deep convolutional neural network, which serves as a binary classifier to detect the presence of smoke. We also formulate the wildfire camera placement problem as a binary integer programming problem to minimize the overall fire risk of a given area. Case studies on real-world videos are carried out to validate the accuracy as well as the computational and memory efficiency of the proposed smoke detection framework. We also validate our proposed camera placement strategy by simulating the deployment of wildfire cameras across a test region in Southern California.

Micro-grids’ operations offer local reliability; in the event of faults or low voltage/frequency events on the utility side, micro-grids can disconnect from the main grid and operate autonomously while providing a continued supply of power to local customers. With the ever-increasing penetration of renewable generation, however, operations of micro-grids become increasingly complicated because of the associated fluctuations of voltages. As a result, transformer taps are adjusted frequently, thereby leading to fast degradation of expensive tap-changer transformers. In the islanding mode, the difficulties also come from the drop in voltage and frequency upon disconnecting from the main grid. To appropriately model the above, non-linear AC power flow constraints are necessary. Computationally, the discrete nature of tap-changer operations and the stochasticity caused by renewables add two layers of difficulty on top of a complicated AC-OPF problem. To resolve the above computational difficulties, the main principles of the recently developed “l1-proximal” Surrogate Lagrangian Relaxation are extended. Testing results based on the nine-bus system demonstrate the efficiency of the method to obtain the exact feasible solutions for micro-grid operations, thereby avoiding approximations inherent to existing methods; in particular, fast convergence of the method to feasible solutions is demonstrated. It is also demonstrated that through the optimization, the number of tap changes is drastically reduced, and the method is capable of efficiently handling networks with meshed topologies.