Harnessing Flexible Resources and Wide-Area Sensing to Enable Smarter Power Grids that Automatically Combat Transmission Bottlenecks and Prevent Blackouts

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The source of national income in Canada has been transferred from the production to services sector. Such a transition is also occurring in electric industry, where the main focus is being transferred from power generation to smart networks ensuring electricity distribution and management. The resulting more complex integrated system is facing five main challenges: 1) Massive integration of renewable energies with limited predictability (e.g., a 24-hour forecast can be affected by a 10% error) and less inertia, 2) Ageing asset, operated closer to its stability limit, 3) Insertion of new, FACTS and HVdc devices for increased controllability; 4) Widespread roll-out of synchrophasors units and smart meters for wide-area observability, 5) Open-access to North-American electricity markets with its huge power flows over large distances and minute-to-minute transactions. The proposed research aims at increasing asset utilization and flexibility while containing increased blackout risks in these stressed grids by harnessing new technologies that enable smart control, wide-area situational awareness and automated dispatching. We will focus on three Thrusts: A) PMU Analytics: Development of intelligent wide-area situational awareness system using synchrophasors and operational data in a real-time streaming analytics framework. B) Power grid control for improved network utilization: Development of sparsity promoting control schemes for resilient modulation of intelligent loads, distributed storage and dynamic Var resources to increase stability limits; C) Automatic network operator: Development of an intelligent dispatcher aid providing optimal generator schedules and network switching sequences to fix security violations and restore system safety margins with minimum human intervention. Through new devices, streaming analytics and stability controls, we will contribute to the emergence of smarter grids, rich in data and renewable energy sources, and operated closer to their limits. Our findings will hence touch on five technologies that are shaping the functionality of our tomorrow's electricity system according to CEA vision 2050: Demand response; Facilitation of distributed generation and electric vehicles; Optimization of asset use; And fault detection and mitigation. The research outcomes are expected to have a profound technological and scientific impact, in providing in-depth understanding and guidelines for engineering more flexible and optimized adaptive power grids monitoring and control systems, and in helping Canada to establish and reinforce its leadership in green electricity integration. This program will also train a large pool of highly qualified personnel, providing them with valuable insights and experiences in smart grid and renewable energies integration, and enabling them to emerge as expert additions to Canadian electricity industry.