Decentralized and Fault-Tolerant Control of Power Systems with High Levels of Renewables

Inter-area oscillations have been identified as a major problem faced by most power systems and stability of these oscillations are of vital concern due to the potential for equipment damage and resulting restrictions on available transmission capacity. In recent years, wide-area measurement systems (WAMSs) have been deployed that allow inter-area modes to be observed and identified.Power grids consist of interconnections of many subsystems which may interact with their neighbors and include several sensors and actuator arrays. Modern grids are spatially distributed and centralized strategies are computationally expensive and might be impractical in terms of hardware limitations such as communication speed. Hence, decentralized control strategies are more desirable.Recently, the use of HVDC links, FACTS devices and renewable sources for damping of inter-area oscillations have been discussed in the literature. However, very few such systems have been deployed in practice partly due to the high level of robustness and reliability requirements for any closed loop power system controls. For instance, weather dependent sources such as distributed winds have the ability to provide services only within a narrow range and might not always be available due to weather, maintenance or communication failures.Given this background, the motivation of this work is to ensure power grid resiliency and improve overall grid reliability. The first consideration is the design of optimal decentralized controllers where decisions are based on a subset of total information. The second consideration is to design controllers that incorporate actuator limitations to guarantee the stability and performance of the system. The third consideration is to build robust controllers to ensure resiliency to different actuator failures and availabilities. The fourth consideration is to design distributed, fault-tolerant and cooperative controllers to address above issues at the same time. Finally, stability problem of these controllers with intermittent information transmission is investigated.To validate the feasibility and demonstrate the design principles, a set of comprehensive case studies are conducted based on different power system models including 39-bus New England system and modified Western Electricity Coordinating Council (WECC) system with different operating points, renewable penetration and failures

Centralized and distributed command governor approaches for water supply systems management

© 2018 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.This paper evaluates the applicability of Command Governor (CG) strategies to the optimal management of Drinking Water Supply Systems (DWSS) in both centralized and distributed ways. It will be shown that CG approaches provide an adequate framework for addressing the management of these large-scale interconnected systems in the presence of periodically time-varying disturbances (water demands) that can be anticipated by using time-series forecasting approaches. The proposed centralized and distributed CG schemes are presented, discussed and compared when applied to the management of DWSS considering the same set of operational goals in all cases. The paper illustrates the effectiveness of all strategies using the Barcelona DWSS as a case study and highlighting the advantages of each approach.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Incorporating Risk into Control Design for Emergency Operation of Turbo-Fan Engines

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/90650/1/AIAA-2011-1591-262.pd

Optimal dispatch of uncertain energy resources

The future of the electric grid requires advanced control technologies to reliably integrate high level of renewable generation and residential and small commercial distributed energy resources (DERs). Flexible loads are known as a vital component of future power systems with the potential to boost the overall system efficiency. Recent work has expanded the role of flexible and controllable energy resources, such as energy storage and dispatchable demand, to regulate power imbalances and stabilize grid frequency. This leads to the DER aggregators to develop concepts such as the virtual energy storage system (VESS). VESSs aggregate the flexible loads and energy resources and dispatch them akin to a grid-scale battery to provide flexibility to the system operator. Since the level of flexibility from aggregated DERs is uncertain and time varying, the VESSs’ dispatch can be challenging. To optimally dispatch uncertain, energy-constrained reserves, model predictive control offers a viable tool to develop an appropriate trade-off between closed-loop performance and robustness of the dispatch. To improve the system operation, flexible VESSs can be formulated probabilistically and can be realized with chance-constrained model predictive control. The large-scale deployment of flexible loads needs to carefully consider the existing regulation schemes in power systems, i.e., generator droop control. In this work first, we investigate the complex nature of system-wide frequency stability from time-delays in actuation of dispatchable loads. Then, we studied the robustness and performance trade-offs in receding horizon control with uncertain energy resources. The uncertainty studied herein is associated with estimating the capacity of and the estimated state of charge from an aggregation of DERs. The concept of uncertain flexible resources in markets leads to maximizing capacity bids or control authority which leads to dynamic capacity saturation (DCS) of flexible resources. We show there exists a sensitive trade-off between robustness of the optimized dispatch and closed-loop system performance and sacrificing some robustness in the dispatch of the uncertain energy capacity can significantly improve system performance. We proposed and formulated a risk-based chance constrained MPC (RB-CC-MPC) to co-optimize the operational risk of prematurely saturating the virtual energy storage system against deviating generators from their scheduled set-point. On a fast minutely timescale, the RB-CC-MPC coordinates energy-constrained virtual resources to minimize unscheduled participation of ramp-rate limited generators for balancing variability from renewable generation, while taking into account grid conditions. We show under the proposed method it is possible to improve the performance of the controller over conventional distributionally robust methods by more than 20%. Moreover, a hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) simulation of a cyber-physical system consisting of packetized energy management (PEM) enabled DERs, flexible VESSs and transmission grid is developed in this work. A predictive, energy-constrained dispatch of aggregated PEM-enabled DERs is formulated, implemented, and validated on the HIL cyber-physical platform. The experimental results demonstrate that the existing control schemes, such as AGC, dispatch VESSs without regard to their energy state, which leads to unexpected capacity saturation. By accounting for the energy states of VESSs, model-predictive control (MPC) can optimally dispatch conventional generators and VESSs to overcome disturbances while avoiding undesired capacity saturation. The results show the improvement in dynamics by using MPC over conventional AGC and droop for a system with energy-constrained resources

A Criterion for Designing Emergency Control Schemes to Counteract Communication Failures in Wide-Area Damping Control

© The Authors 2023. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. For more information, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Communication failures and transmission delays are two major issues associated with Wide-Area Damping Controllers (WADCs). While transmission delays have been extensively studied and various solutions have been proposed, little research has been done on communication failures and most of the proposed methods are based on preventive controls. However, in today’s liberalized electricity markets, preventive controls are no longer acceptable and the trend is to use emergency controls instead. This paper proposes a novel emergency control scheme to counteract the loss of remote signals related to the input and to the output of the WADC (i.e. sensor and actuator failures). The proposed scheme is based on a simple criterion, which overcomes the complexity of the previous methods. Modal analysis and time domain simulations are performed to verify the performance of the proposed method. The simulation results show that the proposed method performs well in handling communication failures and can maintain good damping performance. This research work is particularly important in view of the trend towards the wide-scale adoption of wide-area measurement technologies, while the vulnerability to cyber-attacks is increasing.Peer reviewe

Artificial Intelligence for Resilience in Smart Grid Operations

Today, the electric power grid is transforming into a highly interconnected network of advanced technologies, equipment, and controls to enable a smarter grid. The growing complexity of smart grid requires resilient operation and control. Power system resilience is defined as the ability to harden the system against and quickly recover from high-impact, low-frequency events. The introduction of two-way flows of information and electricity in the smart grid raises concerns of cyber-physical attacks. Proliferated penetration of renewable energy sources such as solar photovoltaic (PV) and wind power introduce challenges due to the high variability and uncertainty in generation. Unintentional disruptions and power system component outages have become a threat to real-time power system operations. Recent extreme weather events and natural disasters such as hurricanes, storms, and wildfires demonstrate the importance of resilience in the power system. It is essential to find solutions to overcome these challenges in maintaining resilience in smart grid. In this dissertation, artificial intelligence (AI) based approaches have been developed to enhance resilience in smart grid. Methods for optimal automatic generation control (AGC) have been developed for multi-area multi-machine power systems. Reliable AI models have been developed for predicting solar irradiance, PV power generation, and power system frequencies. The proposed short-horizon AI prediction models ranging from few seconds to a minute plus, outperform the state-of-art persistence models. The AI prediction models have been applied to provide situational intelligence for power system operations. An enhanced tie-line bias control in a multi-area power system for variable and uncertain environments has been developed with predicted PV power and bus frequencies. A distributed and parallel security-constrained optimal power flow (SCOPF) algorithm has been developed to overcome the challenges in solving SCOPF problem for large power networks. The methods have been developed and tested on an experimental laboratory platform consisting of real-time digital simulators, hardware/software phasor measurement units, and a real-time weather station

Electromechanical Dynamics of High Photovoltaic Power Grids

This dissertation study focuses on the impact of high PV penetration on power grid electromechanical dynamics. Several major aspects of power grid electromechanical dynamics are studied under high PV penetration, including frequency response and control, inter-area oscillations, transient rotor angle stability and electromechanical wave propagation.To obtain dynamic models that can reasonably represent future power systems, Chapter One studies the co-optimization of generation and transmission with large-scale wind and solar. The stochastic nature of renewables is considered in the formulation of mixed-integer programming model. Chapter Two presents the development procedures of high PV model and investigates the impact of high PV penetration on frequency responses. Chapter Three studies the impact of PV penetration on inter-area oscillations of the U.S. Eastern Interconnection system. Chapter Four presents the impacts of high PV on other electromechanical dynamic issues, including transient rotor angle stability and electromechanical wave propagation. Chapter Five investigates the frequency response enhancement by conventional resources. Chapter Six explores system frequency response improvement through real power control of wind and PV. For improving situation awareness and frequency control, Chapter Seven studies disturbance location determination based on electromechanical wave propagation. In addition, a new method is developed to generate the electromechanical wave propagation speed map, which is useful to detect system inertia distribution change. Chapter Eight provides a review on power grid data architectures for monitoring and controlling power grids. Challenges and essential elements of data architecture are analyzed to identify various requirements for operating high-renewable power grids and a conceptual data architecture is proposed. Conclusions of this dissertation study are given in Chapter Nine