Against this backdrop, the work to be presented here is intended as a cautionary note to indicate that opportunity exists for a very subtle, high risk form of anti-competitive behavior through feedback control design. In many ways, a synchronous electric power grid presents dynamic features unlike those of any other market. In a power network, rival sets of generating units do not interact only through the market; their electro-mechanical dynamics are tightly coupled through the grid. Therefore, the dynamic governor and excitation control exercised at one machine can have large impact on the dynamic response of other generating units, and on the network as a whole. The models that govern this response are well understood, and in many cases, regulatory bodies have dictated that significant portions of the model data should be in the public domain to "facilitate open markets." However, we will show that a dynamic model based on this data also allows a predatory market participant to design controls that target competitors to experience unstable oscillations following an otherwise survivable system disturbance. The associated eigenstructure assignment problem, and observers that allow its fully localized implementation, will be described in this talk.
As a final note, this talk will argue that the measurement and computation necessary to reliably detect and police against the behavior described is inherently more complex than that necessary to implement the predatory control. The control implementation is shown to reduce to a sequence of second order linear controllers. To detect the presence of a predatory control scheme from currently available measurements, a central operator would be faced with a very high dimensional, nonlinear parameter estimation problem. If the predatory control were put in place only intermittently, at times when random system disturbances were present, the challenge of detection becomes even greater.
Time and Place: Wed., Apr. 14, 3:30-4:30 pm in 4610 Engr. Hall.
SYSTEMS SEMINAR WEB PAGE: http://www.cae.wisc.edu/~gubner/seminar/