Overview: Systems Engineering disciplines and tooling have been successfully adopted by many other sectors that work with highly complex systems. By comparison, their application in the electric power sector has been negligible. Here we explore how MBSE can support the analysis, rationalisation and evolution of the massively complex architecture inherent in Australia’s largest legacy GW-scale power system as it transforms.
Context: GW-scale power systems are some of the largest and most complex systems ever created by humans. Global progress toward deep decarbonisation of legacy grids presents significant challenges as traditional sources of generation are withdrawn and new highly variable, weather-dependent, locationally dispersed, numerically large, and non-merchant resources take their place.
Purpose: In this transformational context, the purpose of this work was to explore MBSE’s potential to:
Approach: A key focus of the work was modelling the underlying as-built architecture of Australia’s National Electricity Market (NEM) power system, potential transitionary and plausible future ‘step change’ architecture that accommodates the cyber- and physics-based realities of deeply integrating millions of diverse energy resources to become an integral part of a 21st century power system. Given limited precedence in applying MBSE to power systems, an important first step was the model configuration including a taxonomy of logical interface types.
Insights: MBSE provides a shared systems-based methodology to develop integrated solutions in support of a transition to advanced whole-system coordination that spans bulk power, transmission, distribution, and aggregation of distributed resources to the benefit all.