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Center for Nonlinear Studies |
The smart grid is a vision for the electric system of the future that goes far beyond simply generating, transmitting and delivering power more reliability and more efficiently. Part of the vision includes bringing the behavior of individual loads and energy consumption to bear on the processes that govern large-scale system phenomena. This talk gives an elementary account of how a statistical thermodynamic approach can help us understand certain economic and physical behaviors of the smart grid. We will discuss how entropy measures the flexibility of a system and how an efficient distribution market can choose the state that maximizes entropy. When two separate power systems are connected they freely exchange power, the total power remains constant, but the constraints on individual exchanges are lifted and the price of energy changes. The result is a transfer of benefit from one system to another that increases the combined systemfs entropy to a state which an efficient market will always find, but a flawed market may not find. This observation allows us to derive a number of useful aggregate system parameters that can be observed and perhaps used to monitor and control market-based systems. Beyond the observed relation between entropy maximization and market efficiency, we can also identify a parameter analogous to thermodynamic temperature, T, that is associated with the net flow of benefits from the market with higher T to the one with lower T; and an analog to electrochemical potential, M, that is associated with the net transfer of control from the system with higher M to the one with lower M. While this approach differs from traditional methods used to study power markets, the results appear consistent with them but may provide the opportunity for useful insights into the behavior of the future smart grid as it matures. Biography: David Chassin is a staff scientist at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, where he has worked in energy systems modeling, diagnostics, and control system research and development since 1992. Prior to that, he was Vice-President of Development at Image Systems Technology, where he led the commercialization of his thesis work on image processing for computer aided design systems, which is marketed today by Autodesk as gCAD Overlayh. Today, he is the principle investigator for the development of GridLAB-D, DOEfs next generation smart grid simulator.
Host: Misha Chertkov