Future Power Systems - the importance and rationale of enforcing and segmenting the electrical energy grid

Most of today power systems are aiming to become a large synchronous system over a region which covers a big nation or union of nations. Europe is known as being a successful one-only synchronous system. India reached the same goal, while countries like USA and Japan are still segmented in more than one TSO controlled systems. The paper investigates the architectures and rationale for a unique power system and analyses a vertically segmentation to allow resiliency and immunity at prosumer, building, neighborhood and microgrid level, by using new technologies such as the solid-state transformer, hybrid inverters and DC busses to supply the resilient loads of the prosumers or of other aggregated local entities. For this, the paper presents an architecture which give progressively both advantages of large synchronous systems but also the resiliency needed at the level of end-users against local or general disturbances which can be propagated over the whole system.