Course Series Content

• The scope of the System (people, things, processes/behaviors) by which individuals and businesses apply the energy they need to accomplish personal and economic outcomes, such as lighting, motive power, and space conditioning.
• Opportunities to make other infrastructures (waste water, transportation, telecommunications, and natural gas) greener and more sustainable during the Smart Grid conversion process.
• 21st century pressures on the System, including climate change and other environmental concerns, increasing population and urbanization, aging infrastructure and potentially disruptive technological change, changing demographics - with implications for both the workforce and customer behavior, and economic change.
• The Smart Grid, including its technical components and intended outcomes, the various legislation and other policy directives related to it, the variety of participants involved in it, and the experiments underway.
• Hybrid Electric Plug-In Vehicles (PHEV), the Smart Garage, and Vehicle to Grid (V2G) systems and their implications for transportation, land use, and electricity planning, and carbon emissions.
• How electric utilities currently plan for future increases in the consumption of electricity through integrated resource planning (IRP), a 20-year old process that includes collaboration and consideration of a wide range of alternatives.
• Modification to and evolution of IRP to Integrated System Planning, which shifts the focus of planning efforts from additional central station generators to local resources and networks supplemented as necessary by central station generation, and from a single-utility perspective to cooperation and coordination among multiple infrastructures, such as natural gas, water, and telecommunications.