The future of transmission - Switching to silicon

Reprinted from the EPRI Journal, June 1989. Economic and social forces, in addition to the technological developments discussed here, will help shape transmission systems of the future. Increased competition in the utility industry, for example, may bring fundamental changes to the U.S. transmission network, such as the development of a new hierarchy of control centers and the "unbundling" of services according to different customer needs. And the addition of generating capacity in smaller increments, more widely dispersed geographically, may contribute to the difficulty of maintaining control of transmission systems. Such changes are likely to create a demand for even more flexibility and control, requiring still further technological advances.