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CERTS – New DOE Prog in Elec. Reliability

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The Consortium for Electric Reliability Technology Solutions (CERTS) has been tasked by DOE to undertake a major new $2.5 million program in electric power system reliability research and technology development. (Congress re-established a budget for Transmission Reliability research in FY 1999, in DOE’s newly renamed “Office of Power Technologies” (OPT), formerly called the Office of Utility Technologies, under Deputy Assistant Secretary, Dan Adamson.)

The members of CERTS include:
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL)
Edison Technology Solutions (ETS)
Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL)
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL)
Power Systems Engineering Research Center (PSERC)
Sandia National Laboratories (SNL).
The program is an important element in DOE_s response to the recommendations and findings of the SEAB Task Force on Electric System Reliability final report. (See UFTO Note, Oct 8, 1998, or go to: http://www.hr.doe.gov/seab.)

PSERC is a group of universities that have formed a cross-disciplinary team dedicated to solving the challenges arising from power system restructuring. It’s worth a visit to their website at: http://www.pserc.wisc.edu.

CERTS organizers are committed to a high degree of involvement by stakeholders. In particular, there will be a Technical Advisory Committee (see below), and numerous opportunities to participate in the research itself. A website is in preparation to provide public access to program details and developments.

KEY CONTACTS:

Joe Eto, LBNL, Program Office Manager for the Consortium
jheto@lbl.gov, 510-486-7284

Phil Overholt, DOE/OPT, T&D Reliability Program Manager
philip.overholt@ee.doe.gov, 202-586-8110

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Introduction and Overview–(excerpted from CERTS proposal)

The U.S. electric power system is in transition from one that has been centrally planned and controlled to one that will be increasingly dependent on competitive market forces to determine its operation and expansion. Unique features of electric power, including the need to match supply and demand in real-time, the interconnected networks over which power flows, and the rapid propagation of disturbances throughout the grid pose unique challenges that are likely to be exacerbated in the future. As the physical events of 1996 and the market events of 1998 demonstrate, the reliability of the grid and the integrity of the markets it supports are integral to the economic well-being of the nation.

The Consortium for Electric Reliability Technology Solutions (CERTS) was formed to develop and commercialize new methods, tools, and technologies to protect and enhance the reliability of the U.S. electric power system under the emerging competitive electricity market structure.

CERTS organizes its activities under four major areas: (1) Reliability Technology Issues and Needs Assessment; (2) Real Time System Control; (3) Integration of Distributed Technologies; and (4) Reliability and Markets. The first area encompasses strategic planning; the remaining three areas involve research and technology development. (See individual projects described below).

CERTS Organization

LBNL operates a Program Office for CERTS with day-to-day responsibilities for managing CERTS projects and activities acting under direction from the Management Steering Committee.

ETS operates a Commercialization Office for CERTS with responsibilities for preparing commercialization plans and, when appropriate, implementing commercialization activities for CERTS projects and activities.

CERTS is also working with DOE to create a Technical Advisory Committee, consisting of 10+ industry stakeholders and experts to review the activities of the consortium and provide guidance on research direction.

FY 99 activities for DOE include work in five areas

1. Grid of the Future

The first year of a two year planning study to identify emerging gaps in reliability technology R&D. In the first year, CERTS will lay the groundwork for the development of a federal R&D roadmap by preparing six white papers, which will be the basis for industry-wide stakeholder workshops on: (1) alternative scenarios for the future of the electric power system, including a detailed articulation of the technological assumptions underlying each of these futures; (2) assessment of the technology and control R&D needs for widespread integration of distributed resources; (3) recent reliability issues review, including in-depth analysis of technological and institutional aspects of recent reliability events (e.g., summer 1996 WSCC events; winter 1997 northeast ice storms; winter 1998 San Francisco outage, etc.); (4) review and assessment of the current structure of U.S. bulk power markets and provision of reliability services (including 1998 price spikes in mid-west and west, and absence of meaningful opportunities for demand response); (5) assessment of the technology and control R&D needs for real time system control; (6) assessment of the treatment of uncertainty in planning and operational models.
2. Distributed Technologies Test Bed

The first year of a major multi-year effort to design and ultimately, with industry and other stakeholder partners from industry, operate an in-field distributed technologies test bed. The objective of this work is to develop and demonstrate the technologies and control strategies needed to support widespread integration of distributed resources into the grid.

During the first year, CERTS will: (1) specify the information needed to conduct system simulation studies of distributed technologies, assemble available information, and develop a plan for additional laboratory bench tests to gather missing information; (2) conduct simulation studies of the different scenarios of distributed technology penetration using available data and models to evaluate distribution system reliability impacts and identify micro-grid control issues; and (3) develop a multi-year demonstration plan for a distributed technologies test bed.

3. Reliability Market Monitoring, Design, and Analysis

The first year of a multi-year effort to improve the design and operation of markets for the provision of reliability services in a restructured electricity industry. An integrated set of data development, simulation, and design activities will provide both immediate and longer-term benefits to emerging competitive markets.

During the first year, CERTS will: (1) collect data on ancillary services market compliance for the CA ISO and evaluate alternative user interfaces for using these data; (2) use these and other data to examine the performance of the market and, where warranted, suggest directions for fundamental changes in the design of these markets; (3) use experimental economic methods and other methods to simulate the performance of both current and proposed market designs; and (4) analyze customer-side technical requirements for provision of reliability services

4. Smart VAR Management System

Develop and demonstrate a software tool that will allow system operators to measure, communicate, and process real-time data to perform a VAR analysis of the WSCC grid and provide system operators with voltage profiles and reactive reserve margins at key substations. Had this tool been available, the 1996 outages on the Western grid could have been prevented.

During the first year, CERTS will develop, prototype, and field-test hardware and software that can be integrated with current energy management systems to provide operators with necessary information, contingency simulation, performance tracking, and report generation on voltage and reactive reserve margins.

5. Distributed Control

The first year of a multi-year effort to develop and demonstrate the appropriate role for distributed controls in management of the operations of regional power systems. During the first year, CERTS will initiate a demonstration of the ability and comparative performance of autonomous reasoning agents to maintain power system reliability compared to conventional centralized control methods.

Hybrid power system splits petroleum fuel for fuel cell and IC engine

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Subject: UFTO Note – Hybrid power system splits petroleum fuel for fuel cell and IC engine
Date: Mon, 21 Jul 1997
From: Ed Beardsworth

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| ** UFTO ** Edward Beardsworth ** Consultant
| 951 Lincoln Ave. tel 415-328-5670
| Palo Alto CA 94301-3041 fax 415-328-5675
| http://www.ufto.com edbeards@ufto.com
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Hybrid power system splits petroleum fuel for fuel cell and IC engine

Procyon Power Systems Inc is developing an innovative hybrid power plant that combines an internal combustion engine and a fuel cell. The system features a unique proprietary fuel processor that extracts a portion of the hydrogen from the hydrocarbon fuel for use in the fuel cell. The remaining carbon-rich fuel is used in the IC engine.

As a power system for vehicles, the fuel cell delivers high power, while the IC engine handles the base loads. This combination gives an overall fuel efficiency about 2 1/2 times current vehicle engines, coupled with ultra-low emissions. The company has filed a patent application for this hybrid system concept. In addition to vehicle applications, Procyon is also exploring use of the system for stationary distributed power generation.

The fuel processor uses pyrolysis (thermal decomposition in the absence of oxygen) to split the hydrocarbon liquid fuel, and avoids the need for complex gas separation and filtering. A patent application has been filed for the processor.

This breakthrough technology was proven in tests at Pacific Northwest National Lab in December 1996, which showed that 20% of the fuel could be converted to hydrogen without coking. The process heat requirement is a small fraction of the total fuel energy content. As it converts only a portion of the fuel to hydrogen, the process is much cheaper and simpler than partial oxidation or steam reforming.

The Atkinson cycle engine has greater thermal efficiency at low loads than conventional Otto engines. (Otto engines use identical compression and expansion ratios and have a 10 to 1 peak to average power rating, giving better efficiency at full power. In the Atkinson cycle, the volumetric expansion ratio is much larger as compared with the compression ratio, resulting in the best efficiency at a fraction of peak load.)

Thus the Atkinson engine doesn’t have the wide power range of the Otto cycle, but this is exactly what is wanted to provide base load in this hybrid system approach. In a timely confirmation of Procyon’s approach, Toyota recently announced that its new production battery-hybord will also use an Atkinson cycle IC engine.

The company is seeking investment capital to continue its development.
Contact:
Gary Noland, President
Ambrose Manikowski, Vice President
Allen McKee, CFO

Procyon Power Systems Inc.
Alameda CA 510-864-3179 fax 510-864-3180
procyonpwr@aol.com

SPIRE Visualization System Finds Data Fast

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Subject: UFTO Note – SPIRE Visualization System Finds Data Fast
Date: Fri, 23 May 1997
From: Ed Beardsworth

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| ** UFTO ** Edward Beardsworth ** Consultant
| 951 Lincoln Ave. tel 415-328-5670
| Palo Alto CA 94301-3041 fax 415-328-5675
| http://www.ufto.com edbeards@ufto.com
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Spatial Paradigm for Information Retrieval and Exploration (SPIRE)

Visualization System Finds Data Fast

Some of you have seen Pacific Northwest National Lab (PNNL) presentations about SPIRE, for example at the Electrotechnology Conference in Tampa, April 1996. In September 1996, R&D Magazine selected this technology as one of the 100 most technologically Significant Products of the Year.

ThemeMedia, Inc., a new company, has recently licensed SPIRE for commercial development.

SPIRE is a revolutionary software-based solution to a problem facing professional and casual knowledge workers alike — information overload. It enables users to make sense of the mountains of text-based digital information bombarding them daily from media sources, on-line services, and the World Wide Web.

Through proprietary text analysis, visualization and interaction techniques, users can rapidly process textual databases and create visual maps describing the thematic contents of thousands of documents.

The result is information shown as 3-D images that seem familiar to the user — either as stars in the sky or peaks and valleys in a landscape. By interacting with the resulting visualizations, users can explore complex relationships between documents, themes and topics and quickly identify documents which are critical to their analysis.

Uses currently include such applications as intelligence analysis, legal-case preparation and medical case analysis. The technology works with almost any database – word processing files, e-mail messages, patent filings, research papers, legal transcripts, news archives, and even web sites.

ThemeMedia Inc.
8383 158th Ave N.E, 3rd Floor
Redmond, WA 98052
(425) 602-3550 info@smaby.com

(Above text adapted from http://www.smaby.com/thememedia.html)

News clip from web site:
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New software manages mountains of information

Steve Alexander / Star Tribune

Picture this: You are flying over an unearthly landscape where the mountain peaks are yellow, the valleys violet and the terrain has labels such as “TWA crash” and “Clinton and Whitewater.”

No, this is not a nightmare. The information landscape is created by computer software from a start-up Minneapolis company called ThemeMedia that provides a new way of organizing and looking at computerized data.

Originally developed for federal government spies, the software, called Spire, “visualizes” computer data as “Themescapes” (mountains and valleys) or “Galaxies” to help people make quicker decisions.

“Everyone is overwhelmed with information,” said Gary Smaby, a Minneapolis-based technology analyst with the Smaby Group who is chief executive officer of ThemeMedia. “This takes the fire hose and turns it into a soda straw you can drink from.”

But there’s much more to Spire than pretty pictures. The software actually reads and sorts thousands of documents using a proprietary “algorithm,” or computer code, that scans documents for “concepts” rather than words.

What that means is Spire sorts documents into categories without anyone reading them first, and that’s something experts say hasn’t been possible up to now.

Even today’s most sophisticated computer databases require a person to classify information before the database can use it.

That sounds good to Karen Moser, a senior analyst at the Aberdeen Group, a Boston computer industry market research firm.

“I know of no document management vendor whose product could automatically categorize documents without manual or human intervention,” Moser said. Current computer technology for classifying documents is based on searching for key words, not concepts, she said.

ThemeMedia licensed the Spire technology from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Wash., which is operated by the Battelle Memorial Institute of Columbus, Ohio, under a contract with the Department of Energy. The laboratory had developed the software for the U.S. intelligence community to help it deal with worldwide information gathering.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, which had been the focus of U.S. intelligence-gathering operations for decades, spies needed new ways to find information, said Gerald Work, associate laboratory director and a member of the ThemeMedia board of directors along with Smaby and ThemeMedia Chairman John Rollwagen, the former chairman and chief executive officer of Cray Research.

“Suddenly they were faced with the challenge of trying to look all over the world and derive information about a series of events not related to one location or one country. Therefore their intelligence-gathering went from covert sources of their own to open sources of literature — news reports, scientific journals, popular magazines and transcripts of meetings. And they challenged us to come up with a new way of looking at research and analysis when there was too much information to use the old ‘read and discard’ method.”

Seeking intelligence:
In the early 1990s, Work said, U.S. intelligence agencies used Spire to determine whether certain Middle East countries could produce a nuclear bomb. One way to find out was to locate the country that was supplying the nuclear technology. But by using Spire to read thousands of publicly available scientific documents from all over the world and sort them for related concepts, the spies found out in 20 minutes which country was supplying nuclear technology. As a result, they concluded that Middle Eastern nations could indeed build a nuclear bomb, he said.

Now that Spire is being spun off as a commercial product to ThemeMedia, it could affect the way people do research of all kinds, Work said.

“Imagine the impact on a medical researcher interested in particular disease. He or she can scan all the medical literature in the world — not just about that disease, but about other similar diseases or other treatments — then see all that data in a landscape-like view.”

Smaby said that in military applications versions of the Spire software enabled analysts with three years of experience to evaluate information with the same types of insights as 20-year veterans.

Spire scans documents for concepts, then assigns numerical values to documents that reflect the “theme” of the written material. These numerical values determine the relationships shown in the Themescape mountain fly-over view or the alternative “Galaxies” presentation, in which individual documents are shown as stars in a galaxy. Future versions of the software will automatically classify and organize audio and video clips in the same way this one handles documents, Smaby said.

Initially ThemeMedia will offer to do Spire computer processing for other companies, and later will license customer companies to use the software themselves, Smaby said. Although Spire software now runs only on high-powered Silicon Graphics or Sun Microsystems workstations, by mid-1998 it will operate on high-end personal computers running the Windows NT operating system, he said. ThemeMedia also hopes to license the technology to firms that sell databases.

Smaby’s role:
Smaby said he’ll be the CEO only for the start-up phase of ThemeMedia, whose operations and seven employees are located in Richland, Wash. As a start-up, ThemeMedia has raised about $400,000 in private venture capital, will soon seek another $400,000 and by summer may seek an additional $3 million, Smaby said.

Smaby sees the initial users of Spire as “power knowledge professionals” such as Wall Street analysts, product marketers trying to understand trends, advertising executives and newspaper reporters. It also might improve the ability of companies to track news about their competitors, he said. For example, using Spire to scan and display Internet newsgroup discussions of a competitor’s product might reveal a growing number of complaints about the product, which would be displayed on the screen as an expanding mountain.

But Moser said the demand for such a product is unknown. “The proof will be in how many users actually do this rather than just think, wow, what a great idea. The concept sounds good, but we don’t have proof of viability in the real world, and that will be the key issue for [ThemeMedia].”