PNNL

Abstract

While meaning many different things to many different people, smart grid has become a common part of our vocabulary, referring to the convergence of communication and power system technologies, particularly in the presence of widespread distributed energy resources. However, smart grid is only the first step in modernizing our electrical infrastructure – once we have communications and distributed capabilities, we need a means to engage and control diverse utility-owned and third-party assets in a sustainable and reliable manner. Transactive Energy is a means to accomplish this, using “value” as a common language to combine economic and control techniques, and align value streams for all parties by incenting actively managed systems that can align their behavior with the needs of the rest of the system. Note that value is commonly expressed in dollars and cents, but is not limited to money; reliability and emissions are two common value streams that are not currently expressed in monetary terms, but nonetheless have value. This exciting area has the potential to engage highly flexible resources, such as buildings, energy storage, and distributed generation, in a scalable system that improves system efficiency and robustness. In this special issue, we are excited to have contributors from multiple backgrounds working on different parts of a common problem.