ACADEMIA

An ECI Conference

The electric power grid system is central to all critical infrastructures, including transportation, oil and natural gas, water supply, and communications. Events such as the 2003 blackout in the northeastern U.S. simultaneously disrupted ground and air traffic, cell phone and internet communication, food and water service, industry, and banking. The world economy's growing dependence on electricity for power, computerized transactions, and other services will make future disruptions even more costly.

The power grid system faces an evolving set of challenges as it grows in complexity through large-scale adoption of variable and uncertain renewable energy resources, smart grid technology, and energy storage options. At the same time, evolving power market structures and regulations and new environmental policies will affect our future resource mix. These changes will require the optimization of the power system from widely dispersed generation facilities to urban load centers; lead to two-way power flows at the distribution level; and generate vast amounts of information and data that must be aggregated, verified, organized, accessed, analyzed, and secured. These changes represent challenges to grid security, reliability, resiliency, economics, and efficiency.

Modeling, simulation, and optimization have been important tools for grid management, planning, and recovery. There has been growing recognition, however, that current efforts must be greatly expanded to meet the evolving needs of the power grids and that the new methods that are needed will pose significant mathematical and computational challenges.

This Engineering Conferences International (ECI) conference, which will include invited and solicited oral and poster presentations, will provide a forum for the broad power grid community to share their latest methodological approaches, findings, and insights.

Session topics will include:

• Evolution of the modern electric power grid
• Projections for demand patterns, variable generation, energy storage, and demand response. 
• New planning and operations paradigms to reduce the margin required to maintain a secure, stable system. 
• New approaches that make efficient and optimal use of the existing infrastructure and minimize capital investments. 
• Modeling, simulation, and optimization needs 
• System operational prognostics and decision support. 
• Faster-than-real-time dynamic analysis using state estimation. 
• Dynamic model creation, verification and validation. 
• Grid operations and planning 
• Stability analysis for planning and operations. 
• Ultra-fast state estimation for use in real-time applications. 
• Local energy networks, including smart devices and local-area components. 
• Planning methods that support the emerging modern grid (e.g., stochastic planning methods). 
• Wide-area controls for grid operations with demand-side management, energy storage, and variable generation. 
• Integration, optimization, and control of demand response. 
• Advanced unit commitment (e.g., mixed-integer and stochastic security-constrained unit commitment). 
• Analysis of retail and wholesale markets with emerging resources. 
• Characterization of consumer behavior for demand response applications. 
• Cross-domain modeling and simulation for transmission and distribution. 
• Transmission disruptions 
• Sufficiency assessment of primary and secondary frequency response and balancing reserves. 
• Infrastructure assurance. 
• System stability analysis for real-time decision support. 
• Extreme-event modeling and analysis. 
• N-k contingency evaluation. 
• Recovery analysis. 
• Computational science 
• Data management, verification and validation. 
• Modeling approaches. 
• Optimization algorithms. 
• Numerical methods, including those for continuous and discrete variables.
• Visualization. 
• Scaling to supercomputing platforms

Conference Organization

Conference Chairs

Mark C. Petri
Argonne National Laboratory

Paul Myrda
Electric Power Research Institute

International Organizing Committee
Guenter Conzelmann, Argonne National Laboratory
Joseph H. Eto, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Steven Fernandez, Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Brian Gaucher, IBM Research
Ross Guttromson, Sandia National Laboratory
Marco Janssen, UTInnovation
Michael Papka, Argonne National Laboratory
Jianhui Wang, Argonne National Laboratory

Submission of Abstracts

Original papers for oral and poster presentations are invited. Abstracts should be approximately 300 words in length and submitted electronically following the instructions given in On-line Abstract Submission. If you encounter any problems with the submission process, contact Engineering Conferences International (ECI) at info@engconfintl.org">info@engconfintl.org. Abstracts will be published in the conference program book, which will be provided to participants during the conference.

Deadlines

Abstracts for oral presentations: May 1, 2012

Abstracts for poster presentations: August 15, 2012

Conference Venue

Grand Geneva Resort & Spa

The resort city of Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, has a history as a summer retreat for the rich and powerful of Chicago, who built magnificent homes and mansions along the shores of the 12-km-long Geneva Lake in the 1920s. The city, sometimes called "The Hamptons of the Midwest," became a refuge for Al Capone and other Chicago mobsters. Today Lake Geneva is a popular destination, known for its swimming, boating, fishing, skiing, horseback riding, shopping, and dining. A 34-km self-guided hiking trail circumnavigates the lake. Nearby are museums, theaters, and the world's largest refracting telescope at Yerkes Observatory.

Just east of the city is the 4.5-km2 (1,100-acre) Grand Geneva Resort & Spa, one of only five AAA Four-Diamond resorts in Wisconsin. The resort includes a spa, horseback riding, tennis courts, ski hills, and two 18-hole champion golf courses with a lighted driving range and a putting green. Located at the resort is the Timber Ridge Lodge, which features the Moose Mountain Falls Water Park. This year-round indoor/outdoor park has two 10-m high slides and a lazy river. Dining options include three restaurants and room service to midnight.

The resort's conference facilities are highly ranked and have won numerous awards, including in 2011:

Meetings MidAmerica Magazine's Best of MidAmerica Award

Meetings and Convention's Gold Tee Award

Successful Meetings Magazine's Pinnacle Award for Outstanding Meeting Facilities in the Hotels and Conference Centers category

Elite Meetings - Gold Certification

Talk of the Town Award for Excellence in Customer Service

Grand Geneva Resort & Spa is an hour's drive from Milwaukee's General Mitchell Airport and 90 minutes from Chicago's O'Hare Airport. Shuttle services are available from both airports. ECI will provide transportation if there is sufficient interest from attendees.

Engineering Conferences International (ECI) is a global engineering conferences program, originally established in 1962, that provides opportunities for the exploration of problems and issues of concern to engineers and scientists from many disciplines.

The format of the weeklong research conference provides morning and late afternoon or evening sessions in which major presentations are made. Available time is included during the afternoons for ad hoc meetings, informal discussions, and/or recreation. This format is designed to enhance rapport among participants and promote dialogue on the development of the meeting. We believe that the conferences have been instrumental in generating ideas and disseminating information to a greater extent than is possible through more conventional forums.

All participants are expected both to attend the entire conference and to contribute actively to the discussions. The recording/photographing of lectures and presentations is forbidden. As ECI conferences take place in an informal atmosphere, casual clothing is the usual attire.