The world is heating and I believe every moderately informed person would have heard of “global warming”, with even some have noticed the effects of weather change. Unusual flooding, heavy downpours and heat waves – the effects of weather change – are getting more common than ever in various parts of the world, including Malaysia.
I still remember vividly the quality of the morning air at 8 am in the city when I was 7-year-old is markedly better than what we have today. Today I’m 34. I remember this clearly because as a young child back then I don’t usually have to wake up that early.
Current crisis
As I pen out this article, diplomats around the world has descended in Egypt’s Sharm el-Sheikh resort for two weeks to attend the meeting of COP27, the flagship United Nations Climate Change conference that was started in the early 1990s. The main agenda of this year’s meeting is to thrash out deals on how rich countries can help pay for the damage caused by global warming elsewhere. The deal is important because rich countries have enjoyed un-scrutinized industrialization for decades and freely emitted greenhouse gasses, which cause the accumulated ecological damage today.
On the other hand, developing countries today are subjected to various new environmental standards that inhibit economic developments while they to catch up and receiving most of the global warming effects. This is a hard problem to solve because sacrificing economic growth restricts the financial resources needed to implement systems that can reverse environmental damage and ensure environmental balance for the future. Besides, why should developing countries help solve the problem created by rich countries in the first place? Take for example, Pakistan is responsible for less than 1% of the planet-warming emissions, but it suffered heavy flooding this summer in a third of its territories, which caused an estimated USD 30 billion in damages.
In the 2015 Paris Agreement, global leaders agree to cut emissions to keep global temperatures below 2ºC increase by the end of the century, and ideally close to 1.5ºC. The COP27 revealed that the world is now close to overshooting the 1.5ºC target, leaving the key Paris Agreement target in the ash heap of unfulfilled climate promises. Due to the lack of political will and, private sector’s bent on seeking higher profits by pretending to care for the environment – greenwashing, many have written off the target as unachievable. But, the UN is still pushing the principles established 7 years ago.
Now, a UN panel has suggested mandatory emission restrictions for private sectors to save this planet from its deadly future. But, enforcing this measure is complicated. Perhaps, there is no way this can be done without some arm-twisting deals. The panel admits that “a critical mass” of commitments of net-zero emission has been achieved, but the quality of actual implementations is unknown and it calls for an inspection program to vet out greenwashing.
How the Power Grid can help the climate crisis?
Conventionally, power generations all over the worlds depends on coal and fossil fuel, especially natural gas. Coal is used a lot due to their low production cost but they are a lot dirtier than gas. Although, the natural gas is cleaner, they are more expensive, which translates into higher electricity bill for everyone. Therefore, countries try to maintain the balance of electricity billing price and environmental interests, depending on the emphasis of their citizens (read votes) and the political landscape at that time. For example, the Russia-Ukraine war has restricted the supply of gas to Europe, forcing them to increase the reliance on coal despite it being a dirty fuel with the hope of keeping the region warm during this Winter. Ostensibly, all the environmental pledges have to be put on hold when survival is at stake. This is the reality faced by most developing countries every day.
The impact of the energy crisis would be less felt if countries all over the world had increased the share of renewable/alternative energies in their power grids. So, why didn’t we do so? The reason lies in the intermittent nature of the renewable sources and much more. For example, the radiation of sunlight and the amount of wind blow cannot be controlled. When you have it, you have it; when you don’t, what are you going to do? When the share of renewable energies is substantial, the power grids cannot afford to lose the precious sunlight, or wind, in order to keep the lights on in our homes. On the other hand, the supplies of conventional fossil fuels are predictable and manageable, allowing utilities to reliable plan ahead of their power production schedule. But relying on fossil fuel doesn’t get the approval of the COP27.
So, we are stuck in a conundrum. We want to save the world, but renewables are not reliable. Fossil fuels are abundant and predictable, but they are polluting the world.
In my research on Power Grid, I looked at how technologies, such as the battery storage system and the flexible rating of transmission lines, can help solve the above problem by safely increasing the share of renewable energies. Deploying the technologies is not as simple as plug-and-play, because we have to consider their costs, reliability, and how they affect other existing network of power components. The controlling of these technologies is another issue to consider in today’s age of the Internet. Cyber threats can cause them to mal-operate and produce unintended outcomes.
For example, thinking that we have a higher rating capacity than the actual values due to the failure of the flexible rating system is a serious disaster. This can cause the utility operator to load the transmission line higher than it actually can withstand and cause line tripping. The tripping of one line can cause the other lines to be loaded higher and cause them to be more susceptible for overloading and tripping, which can further cause more lines to fail. This forms a cascading failure, which can lead to widespread blackout, and a lot of angry voters. On top of all these, there are the nitty gritty details of electrical engineering that one has to understand and consider.
Therefore, in my power grid research group, a lot of modellings with sophisticated mathematics are involved to simulate the real-world scenarios. Although only simulations, they should not be considered as less relevant than actual experiments. In fact, power grid research throughout the world is done on the computer because grids are a mesh of network spread across a very vast region, which makes it impossible to perform actual experiments on them. Therefore, great emphases are given towards the pragmatism of the model and they should reflect the actual scenarios as close as possible and back by rigorous mathematical proofs.
So, the next time when you see power grid researchers hunker down in front of the desktop, typing away scores of power flow algorithms to simulate various grid scenarios, we are actually saving the world, one sophisticated mathematical model at a time.
