An Assessment of PIER Electric Grid Research 2003-2014 White Paper

This white paper describes the circumstances in California around the turn of the 21st century that led the California Energy Commission (CEC) to direct additional Public Interest Energy Research funds to address critical electric grid issues, especially those arising from integrating high penetrations of variable renewable generation with the electric grid. It contains an assessment of the beneficial science and technology advances of the resultant portfolio of electric grid research projects administered under the direction of the CEC by a competitively selected contractor, the University of California’s California Institute for Energy and the Environment, from 2003-2014

Evolution of microgrids with converter-interfaced generations: Challenges and opportunities

© 2019 Elsevier Ltd Although microgrids facilitate the increased penetration of distributed generations (DGs) and improve the security of power supplies, they have some issues that need to be better understood and addressed before realising the full potential of microgrids. This paper presents a comprehensive list of challenges and opportunities supported by a literature review on the evolution of converter-based microgrids. The discussion in this paper presented with a view to establishing microgrids as distinct from the existing distribution systems. This is accomplished by, firstly, describing the challenges and benefits of using DG units in a distribution network and then those of microgrid ones. Also, the definitions, classifications and characteristics of microgrids are summarised to provide a sound basis for novice researchers to undertake ongoing research on microgrids

Improvement of customer baselines for the evaluation of demand response through the use of physically-based load models

Demand Response (DR) is an opportunity and a concern for markets as well as power system flexibility. The deployment of DR depends on both knowledge on its performance and how to measure it effectively to provide adequate economic feedback. DR verification requires a baseline reference. This paper introduces a new baseline that provides an evaluation of response based on simple adjustment factors through physically-based models, tools which are also used in DR. The approach includes the detection of licit and gaming responses before and after DR. Results show that errors decrease by 10–15% with respect to conventional approaches.This work was supported by the Agencia Estatal de Investigación, Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación (projects ENE-2016-78509-C3-2 P, RED2018-102618-T and ENE-2016-78509-C3-3P/AEI/10.13039/ 501100011033); the Ministerio de Educación (Spanish Government) under grant FPU17/02753, and EU-ERDF funds