Challenges in reliability, security, efficiency, and resilience of energy infrastructure: Toward smart self-healing electric power grid

Abstract

This article deals with the challenges in reliability, security, efficiency, and resilience of energy infrastructure for a smart self-healing electric power grid. The electricity grid faces three looming challenges: its organization, its technical ability to meet 25 year and 50 year electricity needs, and its ability to increase its efficiency without diminishing its reliability and security. These three are not unrelated, as the grid's present organization reflects an earlier time when electrification was developing, objectives and needs were simpler, and today's technology was still over the horizon. Given economic, societal, and quality-of-life issues and the ever-increasing interdependencies among infrastructures, a key challenge before us is whether the electricity infrastructure will evolve to become the primary support for the 21st century's digital society a smart grid with self-healing capabilities or be left behind as an 20th century industrial relic.