AGORA Benefits

• AGORA intelligent grid monitoring and its innovative technology helps in improving the overall score on quality indexes established by regulators (power losses, interruption frequency and duration, etc.), having an impact on the budget and a short ROI period. Minimizing unscheduled interchanges and curbing overdraws improves the overall security of the grid, providing reliable knowledge of the grid state for operations or market purposes.
• Improvement of the public image of the industry in society. Facilitates auditing of grid management practices through the high-quality information provided.
• Increase in the availability of electricity supply, by means of the increase of reliability of Operations (transmission capacity, generation asset management, demand forecasting, …) even near to voltage collapse. Optimize planned rolling blackouts when load shedding is necessary.
• Minimize the negative impact on the press and other media when blackouts occur. The imbalance between the growth of demand and the growth of transmission and generation infrastructures causes new flow patterns and unfamiliar grid behavior, thus increasing the risk of operation.  There is a clear need for better monitoring and decision-support tools such as AGORA.
• Reduction of economic losses in industry, agriculture and commerce. Reduction in the frequency and size of outages, and in the average time needed for blackout restoration. Quote: “…data suggest that across all business sectors, the U.S. economy is losing between $102 billion and $164 billion a year to outages and another $15 billion to $24 billion to power-quality phenomena.” (EPRI, The Cost of Power Disturbances to Industrial and Digital Economy Companies, June 2001)
• Minimize risk of alteration of social order, economy, public services, public health or environment in a region as consequence of total or partial interruption of the electricity supply.

Operating conditions:

• Under steady, stable and secure grid conditions, the Operator performs monitoring and grid control on economic  grounds (minimize losses)
• Under alert conditions, the Operator has to drive the system back to normal again, trying to correct minor events as well as violations of operational limits
• Under disturbances (blackouts), the operator must restore the grid back to service, and ultimately back to stable operating conditions.

Module acronyms:

• RTSim: Real-Time Simulation environment
• CA: Contingency Analysis to foresee future problems under hypothetical equipment failure
• PV/QV: online calculation of P-V and Q-V curves to assess distance to voltage collapse
• OPF: optimizes active power losses, reactive power margins, and minimizing reactive loop flows
• LVS: Limit Violation Solver; provides the best possible corrective actions to mitigate under-voltages, over-voltages, and overloads (always enforcing frequency limits)
• Restoration: provides the operator with the best possible plan of actions to solve reliably the disturbance in minimal time, and observing restoration limits. It monitors the actual evolution of the system and re-calculates the plan whenever it is needed.