grid, to achieve autonomous operation without relying on ICT and prevent wide‐area blackouts.
That it is governed by a harmonious system architecture that allows the grid to expand as well as to decompose when needed, e.g., in the case of faults to prevent local faults from cascading into wide‐area blackouts.
1.4 Summary
In this chapter, the motivation and purpose of this book are briefly presented before describing the structure and contents of the book. Then, the evolution of power systems is outlined, highlighting the prominent features of next‐generation smart grids with comparison to today's grids and the current‐generation smart grids. The next‐generation smart grid has three prominent features: (1) the role of ICT is defined to be unidirectional for monitoring and management only, excluding control, in order to prevent cyber‐attacks and single point of failures; (2) all active players are unified with the same rule of law, which is backward compatible with today's grid, in order to achieve autonomous operation without relying on ICT and to prevent wide‐area blackouts; and (3) it is governed by a harmonious system architecture that allows the grid to expand as well as to decompose when needed, e.g., in the case of faults to prevent local faults from cascading into wide‐area blackouts.
Parts I–V will present the theoretical framework for next‐generation smart grids, its underpinning technical routes, and case studies in detail.
Chapter 2 Synchronized and Democratized (SYNDEM) Smart Grid
In this chapter, a theoretical framework referred to as the SYNDEM smart grid is presented for the next‐generation smart grids – power electronics‐enabled autonomous power systems. This covers the concept of SYNDEM smart grids, the rule of law that governs SYNDEM smart grids, the legal equality for all SYNDEM active players to take part in grid regulation, the SYNDEM grid architecture and its potential benefits, a brief description of technical routes, its primary frequency response, and the roots of the SYNDEM concept.
2.1 The SYNDEM Concept
The paradigm shift of power systems has been recognized by many visionary thinkers. President Pöttering of the European Parliament says that “this is no Utopia, no futuristic vision: in twenty‐five years' time, we will be able to construct each building as its own ‘mini power station producing clean and renewable energy for its own needs, with the surplus being made available for other purposes.” Jeremy Rifkin calls it the transition from hierarchical to lateral power in his book The Third Industrial Revolution (Rifkin 2011) and stresses that the lateral power will have the same kind of transformative effect on society as steam power and the printing press first had, followed by electric power and television. John Farrell calls it the democratization of the electric system (Farrell 2011).
Democracy is a well known political concept that empowers all eligible individuals to play an equal role in decision making. In recent years, this has been widely applied to other areas. For example, Thomas Friedman argues in (Friedman 2005) that the era of globalization has been characterized by the democratization of technology, the democratization of finance, and the democratization of information. These ideas have already started impacting the way commerce is conducted, societies are governed, children are educated, etc.
The most fundamental features of a democratized society include the rule of law and legal equality. The rule of law implies that every individual is subject to the law and legal equality implies that all individuals are equal and should be treated equally. In order to realize the democratization of power systems, there is a need to realize these two features while taking into account the fundamentals of power systems and democratized societies.
For power systems, one important fact is that it is not feasible to rebuild existing power systems from scratch because huge investment has been made into power systems over the last 100+ years. The ultimate solution should be to make millions of newly added heterogeneous players compatible with the grid and follow the fundamental principles of the current power systems. Hence, this is a compatibility problem, which is not much talked about in power systems but is common sense in information technology. For example, the invention of the MODEM solved the compatibility problem of computers with telephone systems and revolutionized the access of computers to telephone systems. The widespread usage of the USB interface made many devices, such as cameras, printers and phones, compatible with computers. There is a need to solve the compatibility problem for power systems, in order to accelerate the paradigm shift of power systems from centralized control of a small number of large facilities to democratized interaction of a large number of relatively small generators and flexible loads (Zhong 2017f). In other words, the rule of law for future power systems should follow the fundamental principle that has been established in current power systems.
Figure 2.1 Examples of divisive opinions in a democratic society. (a) 2016 UK Brexit Referendum. (b) 2016 US presidential election.
For democratized societies, one fundamental fact is that individuals can have different or even divisive opinions (Brennan 2016; Grayling 2017). Figure 2.1 illustrates two such examples: the 2016 UK Brexit Referendum and the 2016 US presidential election. There was no consensus in each case. If the democratization of power systems is implemented based on the current principles of democratized societies, it would sow the seeds of a systemic flaw for future power systems that may lead to system‐wide consequences. Arrow's Impossibility Theorem (Arrow 1951, 2012), named after the economist and Nobel laureate Kenneth Arrow, states that, when there are more than two distinct candidates, there does not exist a voting (democratic) system that can convert individual preferences about the candidates into a transitive, i.e. strictly ranked, order of community preferences under the following four fairness criteria:
(1) Universal admissibility: each individual can have any set of rational preferences.
(2) Unanimity: if every individual prefers candidate A to candidate B, then the community prefers candidate A to candidate B.
(3) Freedom from irrelevant alternatives: if every individual prefers candidate A to candidate B, then any change that does not affect this relationship must not affect the community preference for candidate A over candidate B.
(4) Non‐dictatorship: no particular individual can dictate the community preference with his own preference independent of others.
When each criterion is considered separately, the four criteria seem to be perfectly reasonable but, when all the four conditions are required at the same time, no voting systems that guarantee a rational consequence exist and nonsensical or clearly undemocratic consequences may appear. More dramatically, the first three conditions imply that there will be a dictatorship if a transitive order of group preferences is demanded. For this reason, the theorem is also known as the dictator theorem.
This offers a high‐level theoretical explanation why current power systems “dictated” by large power plants are stable. This also indicates that, after large power plants disappear, a democratized power system cannot guarantee its stability without introducing an additional mechanism for this. It is vital for all individuals to synchronize with each other to reach a consensus, i.e. to maintain frequency and voltage stability. Hence, future power systems
