Role of laboratory education in power engineering: Is the virtual laboratory feasible? Part III Virtual power system laboratories: Is the technology ready?

IEEE PES sponsors a panel session in the summer power meeting in Seattle on laboratory education in power engineering. Six short papers and one full paper summarize the opinion of the panelists. This is the full paper. The evolution of software engineering, multitasking environment, object-oriented programming and symbolically assisted simulation methods have enabled the creation of interactive simulation environments that come close to providing a virtual experience of the actual system. The initial attempts at utilizing this technology are impressive and yet the degree to which they achieve virtual status is questionable. This paper examines the pros and cons of the present status of this technology. We discuss the minimum requirements for a virtual environment. We present our approach and compare it to the general requirements of a virtual laboratory. We conclude that the technology exists today to generate a virtual power system laboratory. Yet much work remains to be done for claiming that we have achieve the objective of having a true virtual laboratory for power systems. At the same time, virtual environments have certain advantages that can not be achieved in a physical laboratory.