CAREER: A Peer-to-Peer Approach to Electricity Supply

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Owing to recent advances in smart grid technologies, the US power grid is undergoing a nation-wide modernization. One of the most important objectives of this modernization is to achieve a high degree of supply autonomy of electricity consumers from their local electric power utilities, which is motivated by the need to ensure a higher level of reliability and energy efficiency. In practice, this supply autonomy is achieved by rolling out customer-end distributed energy resources (DERs), which include, but not limitedto, photovoltaic panels, battery energy storage, and demand-side management solutions. If these DERs are appropriately sized and operated, electricity consumers are shown to significantly reduce, if not completely eliminate, their dependency on the electricity supply from their utilities. While this supply autonomy offers significant reliability and economic benefits, it also reduces revenues streams of utilities and undermines their financial viability. As a response to these reductions, utilities in many US regions have already started increasing electricity tariffs, thus further incentivizing remaining consumers to adopt DERs. This self-fueling process (colloquially known as the utility's death spiral) calls for urgent changes to the current US power grid architecture to integrate DERs in societally acceptable and socially responsible manner. The goal of this project is to design a peer-to-peer energy exchange platform that will manage customer-end DERs using the utility's network infrastructure. Broader impact activities of this project include (a) graduate and undergraduate curriculum development, (b) summer research opportunities for undergraduate and high-school minority students via NYU's Applied Research Innovations in Science and Engineering program, (c) collaborative work with St. Anthony's High School in Melville, NY on new computer science course.The goal of this CAREER proposal is to fundamentally re-think and re-engineer the current US power grid architecture to accommodate a massive penetration level of customer-end DERs, while improving the overall reliability, resiliency, and energy efficiency of the power sector. The proposed solution rests on the following two ideas. First, we will design a peer-to-peer platform that will manage customer-end DERs using the utility's network infrastructure and decentralized, continuous-time control policies, which account for network physics and operating limits. Second, the proposed peer-to-peer platform will be coupled with an AC-power-flow-based energy management system typical for US utilities. This coupling will make it possible to design and compute appropriate network usage charges that peers will pay for using utilities' infrastructure. These network charges will generate an additional revenue stream intended to offset thedrop in the utility's revenue caused by the roll-out of customer-end DERs. Based on these two key ideas, we will develop a multi-year planning model that will optimize the nation-wide transition to a peer-centric power grid architecture and fully harvest techno-economic benefits of smart grid technologies.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.