EAPSI:Improving Electric Power Grid Resilience through a Smart-Grid-Enabled Voltage Support Framework

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Large system-wise power outages such as the 2003 Northeast blackout are among the greatest catastrophes in the U.S. Within two days of the 2003 outage, over 50 million people lost power, and this event contributed to at least 11 deaths and cost an estimated $6 billion. According to U.S.-Canada Power System Outage Task Force, inadequate reactive power support is one of the primary causes of voltage collapse leading to a system-wise blackout. The principle objective of this research is to determine the optimal control strategy for reactive power support from distributed power electronics inverters. It contributes to increasing electric power grid system robustness, reliability and stability. Most importantly, it will lay a solid foundation for future advancements with distributed reactive power support framework. This research will be conducted in collaboration with Dr. Kyeon Hur, an expert in the field of smart-grid technology and development, at the Yonsei University Smart Grid Research Lab, Seoul, South Korea.Traditionally, a centralized control scheme can be used to improve voltage profile in a distribution feeder. However, a full knowledge of system states and two-way communications between end-users and the control center are needed. In addition, such scheme has high computational cost and is not prone to communication failures. Under the realm of smart grid technologies, this research aims to develop a voltage measurement based distributed adaptive control scheme motived by alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM). The proposed control scheme would be able to stabilize the grid voltages under random disturbances such as sudden drop of renewable generations and frequent load variations. Moreover, implementing this control would only require communication between adjacent neighbors, which reduces communication overhead and strengthens the system security. This NSF EAPSI award is funded in collaboration with the National Research Foundation of Korea.