CAREER: Beyond Low-Inertia Systems - Grid-Forming Control Foundations for Converter-Dominated Power Systems

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This NSF CAREER project aims to develop a foundation for real-time control of power electronics and renewable generation that ensures reliable operation of large-scale zero-carbon power systems on time scales from milliseconds to seconds. Today, dynamic stability concerns fundamentally limit the contribution of renewable generation in large-scale power systems. The project will bring transformative change to electric power systems by increasing sustainability, enhancing resilience to severe weather events, and contributing to the decarbonization of the U.S. economy. This will be achieved by innovations in modeling and control of power electronics and renewable energy resources that will enable their full participation in ensuring system stability and resilience. The intellectual merits of the project include developing new optimization-based control paradigms for grid-connected power electronics and analysis methods that will provide a principled understanding of the dynamics of large-scale power systems dominated by renewable generation and power electronics. The broader impacts of the project include increased sustainability and reliability of electric power systems and improved mitigation of and recovery from severe weather events. The project will also address integration of power electronics, control, and power systems education and contribute to developing a diverse and globally competitive power engineering and green-collar workforce. How to control grid-connected power electronics and renewable generation with limited flexibility to ensure dynamic stability of zero-carbon electric power systems is not well understood. The main technical focus of this project is to develop a framework for control design and stability analysis that (i) explicitly accounts for static and dynamic constraints of power electronics and renewable generation, and (ii) prevents adverse dynamic interactions between controls and physics on overlapping time scales. Solving this complex problem will require new models, control approaches, and tailored tools for stability analysis. A particular focus will be on control techniques that (i) enable seamless integration of vast numbers of distributed power-electronic devices by inducing collaborative dynamics, and (ii) autonomously leverage their combined flexibility to reduce the need for centralized coordination.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.