(One of a series of UFTO Notes based on the recent visit to Los Alamos National Laboratory)

ELISIMS

“A Comprehensive, Detailed Simulation of the Electric-Power Industry: Harnessing the Los Alamos National Laboratory High-Perfomance Computing Infrastructure,”

Los Alamos is proposing to use their supercomputing capabilities to address policy analysis of utility restructuring by modeling the entire power system at an unprecedented level of detail — and breadth. Building on experience in transportation modeling**, they suggest that computer simulation at a sufficient level of detail calls for very high-performance computing: (from the abstract of a paper LA-UR-98-5920 )

——- “The electric-power infrastructure is a complex system consisting of hundreds of thousands of independent agents coupled by a dynamically constrained transmission system. Actions of the independent agents are governed by both economic objectives and constraints imposed by federal, state, and local policies. Purchasing decisions by millions of independent consumers constrained jointly by market policies and transmission-system realities will lead to unexpected emergent system behavior with potential consequences on reliability and quality.

Prior testing of energy policy is required, and this requires computer simulation. To do this at a sufficient level of detail calls for high-performance computing and the analysis and validation of emergent behavior.” ——-

The plan is ambitious: (from LA-UR-98-4952)

—— “In a nutshell, we propose to develop and deploy a comprehensive, detailed simulation of the electric industry:

– Comprehensive in that we will include the whole North American continent because that natural limit is becoming the scale of tight interconnection.

– Detailed in that we will include each significant element at the level of generators, transmission elements, varied control elements, and load distribution buses.

– Industry in that we will include the regulatory, financial, and market entities that interact with the engineering elements.

We will design a linked multi-resolution simulation hierarchy with which users may instantiate as much detail and as great a (geographic) scope as required for their particular analyses. Stability studies may require complete calculations in both scope and detail. Other studies (made cheaper by employing either the mixed resolution or a reduced scale) will be more secure with the ability to validate against the full calculations.” ——–

The goal is to capture both power flow and market dynamics together, in a way that hasn’t been accomplished before. A pilot project is underway with the California ISO to evaluate future scenarios for the structure of RTOs in the west.

A 33 page summary report (March 2000) (LA-UR-00-1572) was recently completed, which is available in pdf format:
http://w10.lanl.gov:80/orgs/tsa/tsa4/pdf/infra/elisims_report.pdf
It provides a more complete write-up of the original applications’ study and a cross-mapping to the recommendations of the DOE’s POST report (section 1.5 and Table 1 on page 11).

The program has a webpage at:
http://w10.lanl.gov:80/orgs/tsa/tsa4/infra/elisims.html

Contact:
Dale Henderson, 505-665-2151, dbh@lanl.gov
Jonathan Dowell, 505-665-9193, ljdowell@lanl.gov

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**The TRansportation ANalysis SIMulation System (TRANSIMS)
http://transims.tsasa.lanl.gov/