This enlightening volume examines core areas of development in electric power systems, emphasizing the pivotal contributions of women engineers to the industry’s evolution. The authors cover a broad spectrum of key topics, including generation technologies, transmission and distribution progress, environmental challenges, worldwide electrification, and workforce issues. Advances in conventional and renewable energy technologies, in parallel with growing environmental concerns, and in conjunction with the aging of both the infrastructure itself and the workforce, have led to imposing and fascinating challenges for the engineers of tomorrow. This book documents the critical role of women engineers and their pioneering discoveries, relates their stories of success and struggle in their own words, and shares their perspectives on how these challenges will be addressed in the decades ahead.

"Control and Optimization Methods for Electric Smart Grids" brings together leading experts in power, control and communication systems, and consolidates some of the most promising recent research in smart grid modeling, control and optimization in hopes of laying the foundation for future advances in this critical field of study. The contents comprise eighteen essays addressing wide varieties of control-theoretic problems for tomorrow's power grid. Topics covered include control architectures for power system networks with large-scale penetration of renewable energy and plug-in vehicles, optimal demand response, new modeling methods for electricity markets, cyber-security, data analysis and wide-area control using synchronized phasor measurements.

The electric power industry is reaching a tipping point at which technological, organizational and societal changes are extremely hard to reconcile. Different views are taken by different communities and the taxonomies used are hard to relate. This monograph considers the broad multi-disciplinary problem of providing sustainable and resilient electricity services. It introduces technology-agnostic unified modeling foundations and illustrates their use toward end-to-end cyber design for provable performance of complex electric energy systems. The role of cyber social-ecological energy systems (SEES) is formalized by using the language of large-scale dynamical systems and the key notion of interaction variables is introduced in support of their modeling as multilayered dynamical systems. It is stressed that qualitatively different cyber designs are required for enabling performance of qualitatively different SEES architectures and in particular, it is proposed that composite control-based hierarchical control lends itself more naturally to supporting large-scale regulated monopolies, and that distributed multi-layered control with or without coordination is key to supporting SEES architectures comprising many decision makers. Today's hierarchical control is described as a particular case of hierarchical composite control. Having these formulations may help bridge R&D efforts across vastly multi-disciplinary communities working in the field of changing electric energy systems.