This project is carried out as a part of the NSF Research Centers - Small Firms Collaborative R&D initiative, under the leadership of the Cornell/UC-Berkeley/UI-Urbana/UW-Madison Center for Power Systems Engineering, an IUCRC established by the National Science Foundation.
This project is motivated by the fact that many of the advantages expected to accrue from a competitive electric power market in North America depend upon an open transmission grid, capable of a flexible response to demands for long distance bulk power transfers. Indeed, such power transfers are essential to a competitive market for electric power. Power system available transfer capability indicates how much interarea power transfers can be increased without compromising system security. Accurate identification of this capability provides vital information for operation of the bulk power market. There is a need in this rapidly developing field to synthesize a coherent account of the various approaches to the methods underlying available transfer capability calculations and communicate this to industry. The project will address this need by writing a tutorial on the methods developed and their relation to previous work. Demonstration software to illustrate the concepts and calculations will be developed. The tutorial and demonstration software will be placed on the world wide web so that anyone with a browser can understand the project results and interactively run the demonstrations over the web. This is a collaborative project between the University of Wisconsin, Cornell University and Christensen Associates, a small firm located in Madison, WI.
