Scalable and Flat Controls for Reliable Power Grid Operation with High Renewable Penetration

This project envisions a fundamental shift in the approach to the electric power infrastructure with both a broadening of the electric grid to consider overall end energy use and a “flattening” of the control structure at all levels of the power grid the traditional control strategies. In particular, the research of the Northeastern/Tufts team concentrates on wide-area monitoring and estimation techniques for geographically-distributed electric power systems, with a special focus on mitigating the adverse effects of communication delay and information packet loss, adaptive power-flow control, and fault location from synchronized wide-area measurements. Coordination across wide areas is critical to ensuring that the future grid can enable efficient, low cost and reliable integration of renewables. As such, the work is a system development investigating several areas of control and communications, device technologies as well as electricity market structures. Commonalities arising across these diverse research tasks include the importance of new measurement technologies, increased functionality at the device level and managing uncertainty in both control systems and markets. More specifically, new phasor measurements are used in this work to enable wide area control of the power grid and understand system limits more precisely. Synchronized measurements are used also to locate short circuit faults occurring in the system. New power electronic functionality, both at the source and load, allow improved stability and voltage control. These functions will allow alternative sources to provide grid services to offset their higher costs. Managing uncertainty in the networked estimation and control systems, as for example we do with our delay mitigation scheme, improves reliability and thus, allows greater penetration of renewables. There has been continued rapid growth in renewable interconnections to the grid and the need for improved controls has become critical. These interconnections also necessitated novel ways of protection against system faults given the possibility of reverse flows on certain lines. This third year report details continued progress in understanding the fundamental controls, monitoring and communication structure needed to enable the needed wide area protection and control.