Engineering Papers⌕ Search

SEARCH · Engineering Papers

Results for “microgrids”

Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

Quote a phrase for an exact phrase match. Source license links do not imply unrestricted reuse.

At least 1,135 records · Page 63
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2024

The Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska: Advancing Clean, Resilient, and Sovereign Energy

The Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska (ITKN) is a federally recognized Native American Tribe located along the Missouri River on the border of northeast Kansas and southeastern Nebraska. There are over 800 residents (Tribal citizens and non-Tribal) who live on the reservation, as well as more than 500 people who visit or work on the reservation on a daily basis. The ITKN faces many energy challenges, including rising service costs and dozens of power outages annually that impact resident well-being and business activities on Tribal lands. Power service issues are made more challenging by the remoteness of the reservation, which is 20 miles from the nearest town. Despite this, the ITKN has a long history of cultural and economic resilience: Local self-reliance, environmental stewardship, respecting the carrying capacity of the land, and strengthening the community are Tribal communities' traditional strengths. Long-term energy goals for the ITKN are centered around achieving energy sovereignty. Priority actions include: (1) Establishing a Tribal Utility Authority (TUA) to promote social welfare and community development.; (2) Deploying renewable community microgrids with ground-mount solar arrays and sustainable energy storage systems to advance energy sovereignty, resilience, and reliability. To advance these goals, the ITKN partnered with the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE's) Communities LEAP (Local Energy Action Program) pilot. From August 2022 to March 2024, the ITKN community coalition collaborated with technical assistance providers at DOE's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and Sandia National Laboratories to evaluate TUA planning needs and microgrid deployment scenarios. This fact sheet provides an overview of the results and outcomes from the Communities LEAP technical assistance process.

Communities Leap↗
DOE OSTI2024

Specifying angular reference for robust three-phase state estimation

While the phase angle of any of the bus voltages can be chosen as the angular reference in the state estimation formulation of positive sequence networks, the same approach does not readily extend to three-phase network state estimation problem. It is commonly assumed that there is at least one bus where the bus voltages are perfectly balanced with phase angles displaced ±120° and these balanced three phase voltages are used as the three-phase reference in solving the three-phase state estimation problem. This assumption may be quite realistic in transmission networks, and for distribution networks with a strong transmission system connection. However, it might not be realistic to assume existence of a perfectly balanced reference bus in today’s distribution systems with ever increasing penetration of renewable sources or for isolated operation of microgrids. In this paper, a novel state estimation formulation will be presented which facilitates correct solution irrespective of the existence of buses with perfectly balanced voltages. The new formulation is general, and lends itself to bad data processing. It yields accurate results in any three-phase power system irrespective of its operating conditions (balanced or highly unbalanced), configuration (isolated microgrid, connected to transmission system, etc.) and whether or not it contains any synchronous generators. The performance of the method is validated using the IEEE 123 bus three-phase system.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗
DOE OSTI2021

Designing resilient decentralized energy systems: The importance of modeling extreme events and long-duration power outages

Mitigating and adapting to climate change requires decarbonizing electricity while ensuring resilience of supply, since a warming planet will lead to greater extremes in weather and, plausibly, in power outages. Although it is well known that long-duration outages severely impact economies, such outages are usually not well characterized or modeled in grid infrastructure planning tools. Here, we bring together data and modeling techniques and show how they can be used to characterize and model long-duration outages. We illustrate how to integrate outages in planning tools for one promising mode of resilient energy supply—microgrids. Failing to treat these extremes in models can lead to microgrid designs (1) that do not realize their full value of resilience, since models do not see the benefits of protecting against extremes, and (2) that appear reliable on paper yet do not actually protect against extremes. Although utilities record power interruptions, lack of access to that data is hindering research on resilience; making datasets available publicly would substantially aid efforts to improve grid planning tools.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗
DOE OSTI2024

Operation of Grid Forming Converters as Self Excited Induction Generators Under Non-Ideal Loading Conditions

Self-excited induction generators offer a robust solution for power production for standalone as well as grid-connected systems. In general, self-excited induction generators require excitation capacitors which make use of the machine magnetization characteristics for voltage build up process as well as operation at a specific frequency. In this paper, a self-excited induction machine is modeled with both the electrical and mechanical dynamics. This modeled virtual machine's dynamics are utilized for voltage build up process for a standalone photovoltaic converter connected to a local load for a microgrid application. The modeled machine's parameters are used from the name plate rating from the manufacturer. However, in a microgrid the accommodation of unbalanced and/or nonlinear harmonic rich load is a necessity, therefore, in this work the virtual self-excitation capacitors of the modeled machine are varied based on the machine characteristics. With the objective of ensuring harmonic free point of common coupling voltage, the modeled virtual self-excitation capacitors are varied to accomplish change in terminal frequency and the virtual load torque is varied to obtain voltage magnitude change. To verify the efficacy, the overall system is modeled in MATLAB/Simulink and PLECS domain and most important case studies are presented.

grid forming converters (GFM)↗
DOE OSTI2026

Integration of Multiple Real-time Simulation Platforms with AIO for Scalability

This paper introduces a practical and scalable approach to extend interoperability of Controller Hardware in the Loop (CHIL) validations for large scale microgrids, networked microgrids, and power electronics-based feeders. The work focuses on integrating multiple real-time simulators using Analog Input/Output (AIO) interface techniques in heterogeneous CHIL environment. It explores interfacing methods, highlighting key challenges related to dynamic accuracy and maintaining bidirectional power balance. A comparative evaluation of the Ideal Transformer Method is presented, assessing its effectiveness in multi-CHIL integration scenarios. The feasibility of this setup is demonstrated through a real-time use case involving multiple Typhoon HIL and Opal-RT platforms, showcasing its applicability for distributed system studies.

Khalid, Mohammad [ORNL] (ORCID:0000000179208805)↗
DOE OSTI2017

Power Quality Improvement Utilizing Photovoltaic Generation Connected to a Weak Grid

Microgrid research and development in the past decades have been one of the most popular topics. Similarly, the photovoltaic generation has been surging among renewable generation in the past few years, thanks to the availability, affordability, technology maturity of the PV panels and the PV inverter in the general market. Unfortunately, quite often, the PV installations are connected to weak grids and may have been considered as the culprit of poor power quality affecting other loads in particular sensitive loads connected to the same point of common coupling (PCC). This paper is intended to demystify the renewable generation, and turns the negative perception into positive revelation of the superiority of PV generation to the power quality improvement in a microgrid system. The main objective of this work is to develop a control method for the PV inverter so that the power quality at the PCC will be improved under various disturbances. The method is to control the reactive current based on utilizing the grid current to counteract the negative impact of the disturbances. The proposed control method is verified in PSIM platform. Promising results have been obtained.

14 SOLAR ENERGY↗
DOE OSTI2020

Grid Application and Controls Development for Medium-Voltage SiC-Based Grid Interconnects

This paper studies, the grid-interconnection requirements of directly connected medium-voltage (MV) Silicon Carbide-based (SiC-based) converters and details the necessary control implementations. These power electronic converters follow the interconnection standard IEEE 1547-2018, but can also have additional controls supported by the microgrid standards in IEEE 2030.7, which is demonstrated in this work. Additionally, this paper defines the grid applications realized by these directly connected medium-voltage power electronic converters at the distribution scale and demonstrates results. The controls for the studied grid applications are then developed and implemented on the controller. The paper also includes details of the control algorithm development and validations of the control algorithm through hardware-in-the-loop results.

28 EE - Advanced Manufacturing Office (EE-5A)↗
DOE OSTI2023

Evaluating Recursive Blind Forecast Against API and Baseline: A Puerto Rican Case Study on Solar Irradiance for Normal and Extreme Weather

This paper leverages ongoing work in a community microgrid in Adjuntas, Puerto Rico to forecast global horizontal irradiance (GHI) and compare performance in normal and extreme weather. Given a positive correlation of 0.98 between GHI and PV power, forecasting GHI can be an effective, indirect forecast of photovoltaic (PV) power, especially in microgrids where the end-users, owners, operators, or other stakeholders are reluctant to share data for training or validation due to privacy and security concerns. A recursive one-shot (termed as "blind") forecast is, hence, formulated, wherein a gradient-boosted regression tree (GBR) is built to forecast GHI for a 7-day horizon in normal weather, and a 2-day horizon in extreme weather. To demonstrate its resilience, the architecture is trained on normal and hurricane weather GHI from 2002-2022. It is generalized on February 9-16, 2023, and on the landfall of Hurricane Nicole (Nov 4-5, 2022), respectively. Forecasts from GBR are compared against that from a satellite-based API resource and three baselines: persistence, averaging, and exponential smoothing. Results show GBR and persistence outperform sophisticated API in both types of weather for this case study.

Sundararajan, Aditya↗
DOE OSTI2018

Dynamic Distribution Voltage Stability Control Using Distributed Energy Resources for Improved Resiliency

The main goal of this paper is to present the development and simulation of a new dynamic voltage stability control technique, with a focus on effective control and coordination of all available reactive power generation resources in a microgrid setting. Both power electronics and synchronous generator based distributed energy resources (DERs), and grid-supporting functions, are considered to accommodate a high penetration of diverse DERs and energy storage by using an enhanced microgrid voltage stabilizer. A systematic controller parameter synthesizing method is employed, and the overall dynamic voltage stability of the system is studied and evaluated with a time-domain dynamic simulation during emergency, hazard and disaster events. The results with the new approach show significant improvements and enhancements on the dynamic voltage profile of the distribution system, leading towards a more resilient grid system with high penetration of diverse DERs during emergency, hazard and disaster events.

Hatipoglu, Kenan↗
DOE OSTI2023

A Novel Resilience-Oriented Cellular Grid Formation Approach for Distribution Systems with Behind-the-Meter Distributed Energy Resources

This paper presents a resilience-oriented cellular grid formation approach to achieve scalable and reconfigurable community microgrid operations for distribution systems with behind-the-meter distributed energy resources. A set of interconnected solar photovoltaics, energy storage systems, and load is termed as a cell, implying a subset of the grid that can operate independently using its own resources. Cells are identified such that each cell inherently has sufficient energy resources to black start and can provide a certain level of backup power for its load under the loss of utility power supply. The proposed cell formation approach builds on a unique self-organizing map-based method (SomRes) to quantify a system's resilience. Using SomRes and a non-dominated sorting-based genetic algorithm (NSGA-II), a fast and efficient cell formation algorithm is developed to identify cells in a distribution system that are resilient against extreme events. The efficacy of the proposed approach is demonstrated on a numerical model of a real distribution feeder in Colorado, United States.

distributed energy resource↗
DOE OSTI2022

On Control Schemes for Grid-Forming Inverters

Grid-forming inverters can collaboratively regulate the voltage and frequency of a microgrid. These inverters are expected to be seen more in the future microgrid, undertaking the roles of the conventional power generators. Like conventional power generators, they must balance supply and demand, contribute to power-sharing between inverters and other power generators, and restore the voltage and frequency after any power changes. These technical challenges are typically achieved through different primary and secondary controllers. This article reviews some state-of-the-art primary and secondary control schemes for the emerging technology of grid-forming inverters. First, the typical control schemes for grid-following inverters are briefly presented for the continuity of the discussion on the roles of the grid-forming inverters in future power-grid, followed by two basic control schemes for the grid-forming inverters. Then, two decentralized power-sharing techniques, i.e., droop, and virtual inertia, are analyzed. The technical challenges for inverter synchronization and some control methods are discussed afterward. Finally, several secondary control methods for the voltage and frequency restoration in grid-forming inverters are reviewed.

Sadeque, Fahmid↗
DOE OSTI2022

A General State Estimation Formulation for Three-Phase Unbalanced Power Systems

Almost all of the three-phase state estimation algorithms assume existence of a reference bus whose phase angles are perfectly balanced. This assumption is quite realistic for transmission systems, and also for most distribution systems that are connected to a strong transmission system where transmission side can modeled by a balanced reference bus. However, for distribution systems having high penetration of renewable sources or for microgrids operating in islanded mode, the assumption of a balanced reference bus will not be realistic. While there are recent publications focusing on this problem, formulation of the three-phase unbalanced state estimation problem with proper treatment of the reference bus remains unaddressed. In this paper, a new formulation will be described where an accurate state estimation solution can be obtained for any unbalanced threephase system irrespective of its operating conditions (balanced or highly unbalanced), configuration (isolated microgrid, connected to transmission system, etc.) and whether or not it contains any synchronous generators. Validation of the proposed formulation will be carried out via simulations.

State Estimation, Distribution System, Unbalanced ↗
DOE OSTI2020

Implementing Inertial Control for PMSG-WTG in Region 2 Using Virtual Synchronous Generator with Multiple Virtual Rotating Masses

With the increasing integration of renewable energy, the problems associated with a deteriorating grid frequency profile and potential power system instability have become more significant. In this paper, the inertial control algorithm using a virtual synchronous generator (VSG) is implemented on a Type 4 permanent magnet synchronous generator (PMSG) wind turbine generator (WTG). The overall nonlinear dynamic model and its small-signal linearization of the PMSG-WTG using a VSG is established and comprehensively analyzed. Inevitably, the direct application of the VSG introduces a large inertia, which causes conflict between the fast variance of available wind power and inverter control with slow dynamics, particularly in Region 2 of the wind turbine. Aiming to address such issues, a VSG with multiple virtual rotating masses is proposed to improve the active power tracking performance as well as to boost the inertial control of a VSG. The inertial responses are verified in a modified 10-MVA IEEE 14-bus microgrid system. The assessment of the simulation results demonstrates the applicability of the VSG on renewable energy generation units.

17 WIND ENERGY↗
DOE OSTI2023

A Model Calibration Method for Grid-Forming Inverters Using Iterative Bayesian Optimization

As inverter-based resources (IBRs) are rapidly deployed, especially at the distribution and microgrid levels, the need to include their accurate representations in power systems models increases. With well-calibrated models, IBR-interactions can be examined, preventing any stability and operational issues, especially in islanded systems. This paper proposes a method to calibrate generic inverter models using Bayesian optimization, but with a parameter-grouping approach to improve speed and accuracy. This approach is illustrated for a grid-forming inverter using synthetic data and field measurements from a simple IBRbased microgrid. Tests show that the calibration algorithm has modest computation cost and is robust to noisy measurements..

Biswas, Shuchismita↗
DOE OSTI2017

Using simulators to assess knowledge and behavior of “novice” operators of critical infrastructure under cyberattack events

—The transition from the traditional power grid to the smart grid improves reliability, performance, and management, while simultaneously increasing its susceptibility to cyberattacks. One of the biggest weaknesses in grid security is the human agent responsible for its maintenance and operations. As such, it is crucial to embed hands-on understanding of grid operations and security, especially for students in the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) fields. This paper presents a case study where ECE students from Temple University used an interactive microgrid simulator, "Grid Game", a program developed by Idaho National Laboratory. This case study offers insights into the ECE students’ understanding of key engineering principles (microgrid stability, generation control system, generator inertia, energy storage, and grid security) gained by using the simulator program. Furthermore, the human behavior (strategies to prepare for and respond to cyberattacks, and cooperation and conflict in decision-making) of defenders/ECE students as they experience cyberattacks are also discussed. The paper then offers some limitations and possible suggestions for future research.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗
DOE OSTI2019

Resilient Disaster Recovery Logistics of Distribution Systems: Co-Optimize Service Restoration With Repair Crew and Mobile Power Source Dispatch

Repair crews (RCs) and mobile power sources (MPSs) are critical resources for distribution system (DS) outage management after a natural disaster. However, their logistics have not been well investigated. We propose a resilient scheme for disaster recovery logistics to co-optimize DS restoration with the dispatch of RCs and MPSs. A novel co-optimization model is formulated to route RCs and MPSs in the transportation network, schedule them in the DS, and reconfigure the DS for microgrid formation coordinately, etc. The model incorporates different timescales of DS restoration and RC/MPS dispatch, the coupling of transportation and power networks, etc. To ensure radiality of the DS with variable physical structure and MPS allocation, we also model topology constraints based on the concept of spanning forest. The model is convexified equivalently and linearized into a mixed-integer linear programming. To reduce its computation time, preprocessing methods are proposed to preassign a minimal set of repair tasks to depots and reduce the number of candidate nodes for MPS connection. Resilient recovery strategies thus are generated to enhance service restoration, especially by dynamic formation of microgrids that are powered by MPSs and topologized by repair actions of RCs and network reconfiguration of the DS. Case studies demonstrate the proposed methodology.

Disaster recovery logistics↗
DOE OSTI2021

Multi-Time Scale Coordinated Control and Scheduling of Inverter-Based TCLs With Variable Wind Generation

To address microgrid tie flow errors caused by wind generation variability, here we propose and develop a multi-time scale coordinated control and scheduling strategy for inverter-based thermostatically controlled loads (TCLs). First, in hour-time scale, inverter-based TCLs with adjusting temperature set-point are modeled as virtual generators to compensate tie flow deviations in the day-ahead plan. Next, in minute-time scale, virtual batteries representing operating behaviors of inverter-based TCLs with frequency control are scheduled determined by the control of virtual generators in hour-time scale. The virtual batteries are scheduled to smooth out tie flow errors corresponding to day-ahead plan and hour-time scale schedules. The multi-time scale control methods are coordinated to employ the response potential of inverter-based TCLs and response curve-based methods are proposed to control inverter-based TCLs considering the customer privacy. The multi-time scale stochastic schedules which are based on response curves of inverter-based TCLs are coordinated to accommodate wind generation variability. Simulation results demonstrate that the microgrid tie flow errors are effectively mitigated by the proposed multi-time scale coordinated control and scheduling of inverter-based TCLs.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗