Navigating the Future Control Room: Trends, Challenges, and Opportunities

Book chapter, 2024

The energy system is undergoing significant changes and is expected to continue to evolve. Energy demand is anticipated to increase, as is renewable energy capacity, and technical solutions are advancing. For electrical power, traditionally centralized production is increasingly complemented by distributed production, transforming fundamental system functionality. These developing factors will affect both the power generation and the electric power control systems, which are supervised and run by human operators with support from various technical systems. The purpose of this paper is to present trends in the nuclear power and electric power control room systems as well as possible effects on the human technology organization (HTO) system. Semi-structured interviews were performed with 16 people having various types of expertise linked to process control. The results indicated that in the future there are many possible new technologies and support systems that would affect nuclear power plant-and transmission grid operators in their daily work and the organizations they belong to. With a digitalized control room with higher level of automation, remote operations were pointed out as a path forward. However, cyber-security issues were raised as a challenge. Furthermore, small modular reactors were mentioned to be safer and more efficient but raised many questions regarding organizational changes and operator activity levels. An increasing amount of weather dependent power was predicted to make balancing tasks more complex for transmission grid operators, also affecting the nuclear power plant organizations. To conclude, this study underscores the need for a comprehensive HTO perspective to address evolving roles, safety concerns, and protocols for operator intervention during system failures, necessitating further research in these areas.