The Utility and Grid of the Future: Challenges, Needs, and Trends

The electric utility industry is evolving at a pace that is reminiscent of the transformations that occurred at the beginning of the 20th century. This evolution is driven by various factors, mainly by the emergence of distributed energy resources (DER s) to satisfy societal concerns regarding the utilization of renewable energies and reduction of greenhouse emissions as well as the introduction of a plethora of new communications, control, automation and power electronics technologies and solutions. The latter have emerged as a consequence of the unprecedented growth of computing power and are enabling the long pursued objective of end-to-end real-time system awareness and operation, covering generation, transmission, and distribution systems as well as the grid edge.