Electric power and energy engineering has as a basic tenet the relief of humankind of its burden, and the transmission and processing of information. In this paper, the salient advances of the first century of the electrification of the World is reviewed with special emphasis on the contemporary design and operation of electric power and energy systems. The advancements of power engineering are reviewed from a 2012 perspective, and issues of sustainability and the utilization of renewable resources are discussed.

This paper presents an architecture for a future electric power distribution system that is suitable for plug-and-play of distributed renewable energy and distributed energy storage devices. Motivated by the success of the (information) Internet, the architecture described in this paper was proposed by the NSF FREEDM Systems Center, Raleigh, NC, as a roadmap for a future automated and flexible electric power distribution system. In the envisioned “Energy Internet,” a system that enables flexible energy sharing is proposed for consumers in a residential distribution system. The key technologies required to achieve such a vision are presented in this paper as a result of the research partnership of the FREEDM Systems Center.

The history of ocean thermal energy conversion (OTEC), a process that employs the temperature difference between surface and deep ocean water to alternately evaporate and condense a working fluid, is reviewed. In the open-cycle OTEC configuration, the working fluid is seawater. In the closed-cycle configuration, a working fluid such as propane is used. OTEC is assessed for its practical merits for electric power generation. Because rather large amounts of seawater and working fluid are required, the energy requirements for pumping them may be greater than the energy recovered from the OTEC engine itself. The concept of net power production is discussed. The components of a typical OTEC plant are described with emphasis on the evaporator heat exchanger. Operation of an OTEC electric generating station is discussed, including transient operation. Recent experiments and efforts at the National Energy Laboratory-Hawaii (NELH) are summarized. Remarks are made on bottlenecks and the future of OTEC as an advanced electric generation methodology.>