Toward a Smart Grid: Integration of Computational Intelligence into Power Grid

The development of an intelligent electric grid of future, a smart grid, has attracted significant amount of attention recently from academia, industry, and government as well. Among many efforts toward this objective, computational intelligence research could provide important technical support to help the society to accomplish this goal. In this paper, I present a high level discussion on the vision of smart grid and how computational intelligence research can provide critical technical support to this vision. Specifically, wide area situational awareness and adaptive dynamic programming (ADP) based intelligent control are used as two examples in this work to illustrate the potential technical contributions of computational intelligence research toward the long-term objective of a smart grid. Numerous recent activities in the society on smart grid as well as future challenges and opportunities in this field are also highlighted and discussed in this paper.