Special Session Panel

This session is designed as a structured track combining short framing interventions with moderated expert panel discussions, rather than a session of conference paper presentations. The format is intended to encourage technically rigorous exchange while maintaining thematic coherence and supporting interactive discussion between panelists and the audience.

The green transition represents not only a technological substitution process, but a large-scale reconfiguration of a continental socio-technical system-of-systems. Power systems are evolving from inertia-dominated, centrally controlled architectures toward converter-based, digitally mediated, and market-coupled infrastructures. This transformation introduces new forms of emergent behavior, cross-layer interactions, and systemic risk that cannot be adequately understood through isolated technical or economic lenses alone.

Addressing these challenges requires explicit systems thinking—recognizing the interdependence of physical infrastructure, digital control layers, market design, regulatory frameworks, and societal expectations. The session examines this ongoing transformation from a systems engineering perspective, integrating architectural design, operational stability, market mechanisms, and regulatory structures within a unified resilience-oriented framework.

In recent years, this transformation has coincided with a visible increase in the frequency, severity, and societal impact of large-scale disturbances and blackouts, particularly in highly interconnected and market-oriented environments, revealing emerging systemic vulnerabilities associated with reduced synchronous inertia, declining system strength, high penetration of power-electronic interfaced resources, and tight cross-border coupling. Similar phenomena have been observed globally, with major outages in North America, Australia, South America, and parts of Asia demonstrating how rapidly converter-dominated systems can transition from normal operation to widespread collapse within seconds.

Within this changing landscape, new categories of system actors are gaining prominence. Large electricity consumers equipped with advanced power-electronic interfaces—such as hyperscale data centers—are becoming significant dynamic participants in the power system. Although not generators in the traditional sense, their scale, controllability, power quality sensitivity, and increasing deployment of on-site generation and storage create new forms of interaction between demand-side infrastructures and transmission-level dynamics.

A central systems-engineering issue addressed by the session is the growing misalignment between market mechanisms and physical system requirements. While liberalized, short-term electricity markets effectively promote economic efficiency, they do not always adequately value essential system attributes such as inertia, system strength, voltage support, and fast frequency response. As a result, transmission system operators increasingly maintain security of supply under shrinking stability margins and more volatile operating conditions. This technical–economic coupling problem reflects a broader architectural tension between market-layer incentives and physical-layer constraints.

Organizers: Srđan Skok, University North, Croatia; Renata Rubeša, Croatian Transmission System Operator, Ltd., Croatia; and Dubravko Sabolić, Croatian Transmission System Operator, Ltd., and the University of Zagreb, Croatia