After a brief overview of the motivation for large-scale electrification, the lecture focuses on the associated risks and potential impacts that can propagate across multiple critical infrastructures. The brief analysis of the future evolution of the electric grid development identifies environmental impacts, deterioration of the legacy infrastructure, massive deployment of the inverter-interfaced distributed energy resources, digitalization, and human behavior as the dominant risk causes. The focus then shifts to the new approaches for predicting the risk using advanced machine learning and artificial intelligence approaches, mitigating the risk impacts through various optimization objectives. The lecture ends by pointing out the importance of the societal, normative, regulatory, and legislative changes that need to take place for large-scale electrification not to pose a major risk to the welfare of individuals and the economic prosperity of a society. The key points are illustrated using the Use Case of State-of-Risk-Prediction of the electric grid outages, and future control and protection risk-based decision-making paradigm. The importance of the future research focus on delineation between reliability, risk, and resilience concepts is emphasized at the end.

Mladen Kezunovic has been with Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA for over 35 years, where he holds titles of University Distinguished Professor, Regents Professor, Eugene E. Webb Professor, and Site Director of “Power Engineering Research Center” consortium. He is also the Principal of XpertPowerTM Associates, a consulting firm specializing in power system modeling and data analytics for the last 30 years. He is an expert in protective relaying, fault modeling, automated power system disturbance analysis, computational intelligence, data analytics, and smart grids. He has authored/co-authored >600 papers and 11 books/book chapters, delivered >120 seminars, invited lectures, and short courses, and consulted for >70 companies worldwide. Dr. Kezunovic is an IEEE Life Fellow, a CIGRE Fellow, an Honorary and Distinguished Member, and a recipient of the CIGRE Medal for lifetime contributions. He is a Registered Professional Engineer in Texas. Dr. Kezunovic is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering.