Managing the Future Grid – Evolution of EMS Control Centers

Energy Management Systems (EMS) have been deployed for decades at utility control centers to monitor and manage the electricity grid in real-time. Today these EMS capabilities are poised to be enhanced quite dramatically with growth of synchrophasor PMU measurements.

This presentation will include: the history and evolution of the EMS; the primary functions of a modern EMS; emerging new industry drivers; technology trends; impact of EMS
growth; growth of Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs) and synchrophasor measurements worldwide; wide area monitoring; the EMS for the future grid; India's major investment in synchrophasors and wide area monitoring systems; and concluding thoughts on the challenges and opportunities to manage the future grid.
Jay Giri is Director of Power Systems Technology and Strategic Initiatives at Alstom Grid's NMS business in Redmond, WA. He leads a team of power system engineers who deliver software applications to utility control centers for: electricity market systems, generation monitoring and control and synchrophasor/phasor measurement unit (PMU) analytics. He is a liaison for university research activities and an affiliate professor at the University of Washington.

Jay and 11 other engineers co-founded Energy System Computer Applications (ESCA) in 1978. In 2010, ESCA became part of Alstom Grid (then Cegelec). Jay designed and implemented the original software for the ESCA automatic generation control (AGC) and dispatcher training simulator (DTS) power system simulation functions. Today the Alstom AGC controls over 50% of North American generation as well as generation in many other countries, and the Alstom DTS is one of the predominant simulators used by control centers worldwide.

Dr. Giri has a PhD from Clarkson University in New York and a B.Tech from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Madras. He is an Alstom Grid Senior Fellow and a member of the Washington State Academy of Sciences. He is an IEEE Fellow, and a member of the IEEE Power & Energy Society (PES) Governing Board.