The autonomous grid: Automation, intelligence and the future of power systems

Lately, different industrial domain experts but also wider society circles are increasingly buzzing about and offering their views on introducing and implementing of autonomy and its benefits. People are fascinated but sometimes also scared by the change autonomy could bring in their life. In this paper, we are trying to demystify the hype around the term autonomy and offer our own view on how autonomy could become the part if not the next big thing in power systems, supporting the transition towards a sustainable energy landscape. Our motivation is to, on one hand, demonstrate that our domain should embrace implementing autonomy across its whole lifecycle and on the other, to point out how this transition of technology will also bear a change on human role in power systems and society in general. Finally, we present the software and hardware enablers we believe that could push the transition forward.