Data-Centric Situational Awareness and Management in Intelligent Power Systems

The rapid development of technology and society has made the current power system a much more complicated system than ever. The request for big data based situation awareness and management becomes urgent today. In this dissertation, to respond to the grand challenge, two data-centric power system situation awareness and management approaches are proposed to address the security problems in the transmission/distribution grids and social benefits augmentation problem at the distribution-customer lever, respectively. To address the security problem in the transmission/distribution grids utilizing big data, the first approach provides a fault analysis solution based on characterization and analytics of the synchrophasor measurements. Specifically, the optimal synchrophasor measurement devices selection algorithm (OSMDSA) and matching pursuit decomposition (MPD) based spatial-temporal synchrophasor data characterization method was developed to reduce data volume while preserving comprehensive information for the big data analyses. And the weighted Granger causality (WGC) method was investigated to conduct fault impact causal analysis during system disturbance for fault localization. Numerical results and comparison with other methods demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of this analytic approach. As more social effects are becoming important considerations in power system management, the goal of situation awareness should be expanded to also include achievements in social benefits. The second approach investigates the concept and application of social energy upon the University of Denver campus grid to provide management improvement solutions for optimizing social cost. Social element - human working productivity cost, and economic element - electricity consumption cost, are both considered in the evaluation of overall social cost. Moreover, power system simulation, numerical experiments for smart building modeling, distribution level real-time pricing and social response to the pricing signals are studied for implementing the interactive artificial-physical management scheme

Autonomous Energy Grids

Current frameworks to monitor, control, and optimize large-scale energy systems are becoming increasingly inadequate because of significantly high penetration levels of variable generation and distributed energy resources being integrated into electric power systems; the deluge of data from pervasive metering of energy grids; and a variety of new market mechanisms, including multilevel ancillary services. This paper outlines the concept of autonomous energy grids (AEGs). These systems are supported by a scalable, reconfigurable, and self-organizing information and control infrastructure, are extremely secure and resilient (self-healing), and can self-optimize in real time to ensure economic and reliable performance while systematically integrating energy in all forms. AEGs rely on cellular building blocks that can self-optimize when isolated from a larger grid and participate in optimal operation when interconnected to a larger grid. This paper describes the key concepts and research necessary in the broad domains of optimization theory, control theory, big data analytics, and complex system theory and modeling to realize the AEG vision

Optimal Scheduling of Electrolyzer in Power Market with Dynamic Prices

Optimal scheduling of hydrogen production in dynamic pricing power market can maximize the profit of hydrogen producer; however, it highly depends on the accurate forecast of hydrogen consumption. In this paper, we propose a deep leaning based forecasting approach for predicting hydrogen consumption of fuel cell vehicles in future taxi industry. The cost of hydrogen production is minimized by utilizing the proposed forecasting tool to reduce the hydrogen produced during high cost on-peak hours and guide hydrogen producer to store sufficient hydrogen during low cost off-peak hours

Small-Scale Microgrid Energy Market Based on PILT-DAO

With the installed capacities of Distributed Generations (DGs) dramatically increasing in power systems from Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) such as hydropower, wind, solar, geothermal and biomass, the operation methods of DERs tradings or transactions become more and more complicated. However, the energy market of DERs in Microgrids (MGs) is still under devolvement due to low security and transparency at present. Therefore, a small-scale microgrid energy market is proposed in this study based on Decentralized Autonomous Organization of Parallel, Integrity, Longevity, and Transparency (PILT-DAO) of the features of the blockchain. The microgrid owners can complete the transaction in the PILT-DAO market. In order to implement this energy trading platform, the first step is to simulate a modified distributed IEEE 13 node test feeders system. The next step is to develop a price mechanism method based on a consensus + innovation distributed algorithm to calculate the distributed Distribution Locational Marginal Price (DLMP). At the meantime, smart meters record the Power Flow (PF) data of each DG as one node of the whole simulated distributed power system and send them to blockchain including distributed price and power generation data. The third step is to constitute a decentralized autonomous market by programming smart contracts in Ethereum DAO, running in an artificial system parallelly. A case study of a small-scale microgrid energy market based on PILT-DAO is illustrated followed by the conclusion

Renewable Energy Integration in Distribution System with Artificial Intelligence

With the increasing attention of renewable energy development in distribution power system, artificial intelligence (AI) can play an indispensiable role. In this thesis, a series of artificial intelligence based methods are studied and implemented to further enhance the performance of power system operation and control. Due to the large volume of heterogeneous data provided by both the customer and the grid side, a big data visualization platform is built to feature out the hidden useful knowledge for smart grid (SG) operation, control and situation awareness. An open source cluster calculation framework with Apache Spark is used to discover big data hidden information. The data is transmitted with an Open System Interconnection (OSI) model to the data visualization platform with a high-speed communication architecture. Google Earth and Global Geographic Information System (GIS) are used to design the visualization platform and realize the results. Based on the data visualization platform above, the external manifestation of the data is studied. In the following work, I try to understand the internal hidden information of the data. A short-term load forecasting approach is designed based on support vector regression (SVR) to provide a higher accuracy load forecasting for the network reconfiguration. The nonconvexity of three-phase balanced optimal power flow is relaxed to an optimal power flow (OPF) problem with the second-order cone program (SOCP). The alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) is used to compute the optimal power flow in distributed manner. Considering the reality of distribution systems, a three-phase unbalanced distribtion system is built, which consists of the hourly operation scheduling at substation level and the minutes power flow operation at feeder level. The operaion cost of system with renewable generation is minimized at substation level. The stochastoc distribution model of renewable generation is simulated with a chance constraint, and the derived deterministic form is modeled with Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) with genetic algorithm-based expectationmaximization (GAEM). The system cost is further reduced with OPF in real-time (RT) scheduling. The semidefinite programming (SDP) is used to relax the nonconvexity of the three-phase unbalanced distribution system into a convex problem, which helps to achieve the global optimal result. In the parallel manner, the ADMM is realizing getting the results in a short time. Clouds have a big impact on solar energy forecasting. Firstly, a convolutional neural network based mathod is used to estimate the solar irradiance, Secondly, the regression results are collected to predict the renewable generation. After that, a novel approach is proposed to capture the Global horizontal irradiance (GHI) conveniently and accurately. Considering the nonstationary property of the GHI on cloudy days, the GHI capturing is cast as an image regression problem. In traditional approaches, the image regression problem is treated as two parts, feature extraction and regression, which are optimized separately and no interconnections. Considering the nonlinear regression capability, a convolutional neural network (CNN) based image regression approach is proposed to provide an End-to- End solution for the cloudy day GHI capturing problem in this paper. For data cleaning, the Gaussian mixture model with Bayesian inference is employed to detect and eliminate the anomaly data in a nonparametric manner. The purified data are used as input data for the proposed image regression approach. The numerical results demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed approach

Co-Optimization of Gas-Electricity Integrated Energy Systems Under Uncertainties

In the United States, natural gas-fired generators have gained increasing popularity in recent years due to low fuel cost and emission, as well as the needed large gas reserves. Consequently, it is worthwhile to consider the high interdependency between the gas and electricity networks. In this dissertation, several co-optimization models for the optimal operation and planning of gas-electricity integrated energy systems (IES) are proposed and investigated considering uncertainties from wind power and load demands. For the coordinated operation of gas-electricity IES: 1) an interval optimization based coordinated operating strategy for the gas-electricity IES is proposed to improve the overall system energy efficiency and optimize the energy flow. The gas and electricity infrastructures are modeled in detail and their operation constraints are fully considered. Then, a demand response program is incorporated into the optimization model, and its effects on the IES operation are investigated. Interval optimization is applied to address wind power uncertainty in IES. 2) a stochastic optimal operating strategy for gas-electricity IES is proposed considering N-1 contingencies in both gas and electricity networks. Since gas pipeline contingencies limit the fuel deliverability to gas-fired units, N-1 contingencies in both gas and electricity networks are considered to ensure that the system operation is able to sustain any possible power transmission or gas pipeline failure. Moreover, wind power uncertainty is addressed by stochastic programming. 3) a robust scheduling model is proposed for gas-electricity IES with uncertain wind power considering both gas and electricity N-1 contingencies. The proposed method is robust against wind power uncertainty to ensure that the system can sustain possible N-1 contingency event of gas pipeline or power transmission. Case studies demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed models. For the co-optimization planning of gas-electricity IES: a two-stage robust optimization model is proposed for expansion co-planning of gas-electricity IES. The proposed model is solved by the column and constraint generation (C&CG) algorithm. The locations and capacities of new gas-fired generators, power transmission lines, and gas pipelines are optimally determined, which is robust against the uncertainties from electric and gas load growth as well as wind power