The March edition of IEEE Power & Energy Magazine, titled “Flexibility for Resilience,” features contributions from several experts active in ISGAN Working Group 6. The articles reflect WG6’s recent activity on flexibility for resilience and highlight the growing importance of flexibility as a foundation for secure and reliable power system operation.
Irina Oleinikova of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) served as Guest Editor for this special issue. In the issue, co-authored with Martin Braun, flexibility is framed as a strategic enabler of resilient, future-ready grids. The authors examine how inverter-based resources, digital control systems, and coordinated system operation can strengthen the adaptability of power systems with high shares of renewable generation. This article builds directly on WG 6’s “flexibility for resilience” activity, which brought together national studies and international expertise within ISGAN.
This article, developed in collaboration between ISGAN and ETIP SNET, presents a system-level operational perspective on resilience. Antonio Iliceto and Barbara Herndler explore how storage, demand response, advanced forecasting tools, and grid-forming technologies can collectively enhance system stability under growing uncertainty. It emphasizes the importance of integrating flexibility into planning, market design, and real-time operations rather than treating resilience as a separate objective.
Invited experts Hanne Sæle, Bjørn Harald Bakken, and Kari Dalen from the Norwegian transmission system operator Statnett shared their experience with unlocking flexibility potential, utilizing flexibility in the power system, and ensuring security of supply.
Authored by Mattia Cabiati, Luciano Martini, Omar Pasqualotto, Alex Magerko, Brian Seal, Macarena Morgaz Rodríguez, Maria Alonso Valderrama, and Alessandro Minzolini, this article focuses on practical distribution-level applications of flexibility. It discusses use cases such as congestion management, voltage control, and distributed energy resource integration, while addressing interoperability requirements, regulatory alignment, and scalability barriers. The paper highlights how coordinated innovation across technology, regulation, and operations is necessary to unlock the full value of flexibility.
Our expert from WG 9 (Flexibility markets), Hossein Farahmand, and colleagues from the U.S. Alex Farley and Masood Parvania emphasized the role of distributed energy resources (DER) as a fundamental component in modern energy systems and electricity markets, promoting decentralization, sustainability, and resilience.
Daniel Baltensperger, Irina Oleinikova, and Kjell Petter Myhren examine how protection philosophies must evolve to accommodate inverter-dominated systems and bidirectional power flows. The article stresses the need for adaptive, data-driven protection schemes that align with increasingly flexible and decentralized system architectures. It underscores that protection design is an integral component of the broader flexibility-for-resilience framework.
Invited experts Lucas Savoi Araujo, João Marcus Soares Callegari, Ayotunde Adekunle Adeyemo, Joseph Kiran Banda, Danilo Iglesias Brandao, and Elisabetta Tedeschi, addressed the emerging penetration on converter-based generation through offshore wind turbines and battery energy storage systems aiming to reduce carbon emissions in modern offshore oil and gas platforms, presenting a unique and challenging test case for studies related to power system flexibility and resilience.
Together, these contributions demonstrate ISGAN’s continued engagement in advancing flexibility, resilience, and innovation in smart grid planning and operation. They also reflect the strong collaboration between ISGAN experts and the wider international power systems community, reinforcing ISGAN’s role as a platform for knowledge exchange and global dialogue on modern grid transformation.
