In today's deregulated marketplace, simply delivering power to customers is no longer sufficient; utilities must provide a certain level of quality of service and must deliver the commodity safely, reliably, and cost-effectively. Moreover, information traditionally used only within a given utility is now desired by many players, since the integration, consolidation, and dissemination of information both inter- and intra-utility has become a critical part of the deregulation picture. Exponential advances in hardware, software, and communication equipment allow the transportation, storing, and manipulation of vast quantities of data at blinding speed relative to just a few years ago. As a result, utilities have shifted their focus to information technology and automation to optimize operations and improve the bottom line. This article proposes a global approach for the management and control of medium-voltage (MV) networks. The efficiency of this approach is analyzed in terms of quality of service, optimization of investment, optimization of installation, maintenance, and simplification of operation.

Innovative Rogowski coils enable the design of advanced protection systems when used with new multifunction relays and fiberoptic communication. The protection systems have faster response times to faults and can easily adjust to load and/or power system configuration changes. Since the new Rogowski coils are very accurate and do not saturate, protection levels can be set to lower fault current thresholds, reducing the stress on the protected equipment. The whole system is immune to external magnetic fields and has self-testing logic. No wiring is necessary.

Beyond price, large energy consumers are increasingly demanding higher value for their energy investment. For many businesses, especially those that are part of the burgeoning digital economy, this includes an expectation of energy delivered at higher levels of quality and reliability. These factors are driving enterprises on both the supply and demand side of energy to seek better strategies to manage the cost and quality of the energy product and the energy assets that produce, deliver, control, and consume it. However, to achieve this, all enterprises face three very large and fundamental challenges, which are the needs to: support the economic and efficient delivery, purchasing, and use of energy, guarantee higher levels of power quality and reliability the grid cannot currently deliver Supply the increasing demand for energy while establishing a market-based pricing system. The key to addressing all of these challenges is an Internet-enabled enterprise energy management (EEM) system that delivers real-time information and control through an efficient, economical, and scalable architecture.

Presents the guest editorial for this issue of the publication.

At energy markets driven by deregulation and liberalization processes under way in central and eastern European countries, information and its processing is gaining key importance. Energy trading will require risk management of multiple aspects of power engineering, and decision-making and implementation-support tools will be increasingly helpful. The need for computer support is of particular concern to network companies. Just like control and supervision systems, computer support is subject to far-reaching technical and functional integration. The dynamic development and dissemination of microcomputing technology as well as the transition to a market-oriented approach of power engineering makes this possible, and the introduction of automatic control and supervision systems at all voltage levels is required. This includes distribution lines and substations. The cost of such solutions is decreasing at the present time and may be treated as justified costs in networking power utilities due to increased requirements for energy supply and customer services. This article deals with some main issues of automatic control and supervision systems development and their integration into the general functions of networking power companies. It also discusses common technical frameworks, including their potential application at the national power engineering level.

This article describes an attempt to create a completely Web-based, platform-independent, power system simulation package with various analyses distributed in a clustered environment. This is done in order to retain many of the existing simulation routines that have already been implemented on multiple platforms while sharing many common facilities and resources. It achieves this by leveraging heavily on the advanced distributed computing technologies and by using the model-view-controller (MVC) concept. Applying this design concept demonstrates the potential and advantages of embracing the Web as the platform for developing and deploying complex power system simulations.

The Texas Electric Choice Act, signed in 1999, cleared the way for the deregulation state's electricity market. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) has slated 1 January 2002 for the opening of Texas' electric power market to full retail competition. The pilot market was opened on 31 July, with wholesale deregulation and retail access allowed for 5% of the total retail market. Presently, there are 30 firms certified as qualified scheduling entities (QSE) to participate in the restructured Texas market. Each of these companies faces a variety of IT requirements for communications, analysis, and operations in order to do business in ERCOT's territory. This article focuses on identifying these needs and discusses the IT solutions that must be deployed to meet them.

One of the key conditions for correctly programming the Polish energy market development lies not only in the efficiency of current management, but also in the process of making rational decisions with respect to programming the development of the regional energy supply systems and the sources of such development financing. Making wise decisions will determine the future potential growth of the energy sector, its share in the market, and the potential to generate profit for the national economy. Proper modeling of the structure of national and local energy markets is a key to national economic development during this market transformation.

In this paper, the authors present the results of automated tests which compared power system protection relay behavior for distance measurement, earth fault detection, high-resistance earth fault detection and telecommunication functions.