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

由于最近智能电网技术的进步，美国电网正在经历一场全国性的现代化。这一现代化的最重要目标之一是实现电力消费者对当地电力设施的高度供应自主权，这是出于确保更高水平的可靠性和能源效率的需要。在实践中，这种供应自主权是通过推出客户端分布式能源(DER)来实现的，这些资源包括但不限于光伏电池板、电池储能和需求侧管理解决方案。如果这些DER的规模和运作得当，电力用户即使不能完全消除对其公用事业电力供应的依赖，也能显著减少他们的依赖。虽然这种供应自主权提供了显著的可靠性和经济效益，但它也减少了公用事业公司的收入来源，并破坏了它们的财务生存能力。作为对这些削减的回应，美国许多地区的公用事业公司已经开始提高电费，从而进一步激励剩余的消费者采用DER。这种自给自足的过程(俗称公用事业的死亡螺旋)要求对当前的美国电网架构进行紧急改革，以社会可接受和对社会负责的方式整合电力需求。该项目的目标是设计一个对等能源交换平台，该平台将使用该公用事业公司的网络基础设施来管理客户端DER。拟议的解决方案基于以下两个想法。首先，我们将设计一个对等平台，该平台将使用公用事业公司的网络基础设施和分散、连续的控制策略来管理客户端DER，这些策略考虑了网络物理和操作限制。其次，拟议的对等平台将与美国公用事业公司典型的基于交流电力流的能源管理系统相结合。这种耦合将使设计和计算适当的网络使用费成为可能，对等点将为使用公用事业的基础设施支付费用。这些网络费用将产生额外的收入流，旨在抵消因推出客户端DER而导致的公用事业收入下降。

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.