Thursday, March 13, 2025 - 11:00am
Event Calendar Category
EIMC2 Talks
Speaker Name
Pablo A. Ruiz
Affiliation
NewGrid, The Brattle Group, and Boston University
Building and Room number
45-600B
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"Efficient and reliable congestion mitigation with topology optimization: experience in the Midcontinent ISO footprint"
Timely and effective management of transmission system limitations has become critical to support the ongoing energy transition as well as economic development. Additional transmission capability is needed quickly to support increased deployment of variable energy resources, which often are located away from demand centers, the electrification of traditionally fossil energy uses, and other load growth, such as data centers. Transmission congestion can become acute in many regions, and has imposed over $20 billion of added costs on US transmission customers in 2022. It also impacts grid reliability and resilience throughout the country. To cost-effectively manage transmission constraints will require improved congestion management practices and technologies to better utilize the existing grid, especially as new transmission facilities are planned and constructed. Transmission topology optimization identifies grid reconfiguration options to quickly re-route power flow around bottlenecks, increasing transfer capability across congested areas. These reconfiguration solutions reduce the market redispatch and generation curtailments otherwise necessary to manage congestion and, by doing so, provide operational, efficiency, reliability, and resilience benefits. To facilitate the use of reconfigurations and provide another congestion management tool to transmission customers, the Midcontinent ISO (MISO) has implemented a process for market participants to submit reconfiguration proposals that show promise after initial analysis. The Southwest Power Pool (SPP) and the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) have similar process initiatives under discussion. This presentation will demonstrate the reliability, cost-saving, environmental and curtailment-mitigation impacts of reconfigurations identified on behalf of market participants in MISO, as well as illustrate additional benefits that could be obtained if topology optimization opportunities were used proactively and consistently across RTO footprints.
Pablo A. Ruiz is Co-founder and CEO of NewGrid, a grid optimization company, where he leads the teams that develop topology optimization software technology and provide congestion monitoring and mitigation services to utilities and market participants. He is also a senior consultant at The Brattle Group and Associate Research Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Boston University. He was the Principal Investigator for the U.S. DOE ARPA-E Transmission Topology Control Algorithms project, which led to the formation of NewGrid. Pablo holds a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.