Facilities in Support of Research and Development of Residential Microgrids

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The objective of this RTI application is to expand an existing microgrid research laboratory by increasing its capability for carrying out experiments on control and energy management for residential microgrids involving phase-wise renewable energy resources and phase-wise battery storage at the distribution level. Consider a neighbourhood where families are separated into three groups, and powered from different phases (A, B, C) through the distribution transformer. Since different families will have different patterns for power consumption, different generation capacities from renewable energy resources, and storage capabilities (some with installed battery banks, some with electric vehicles, others may not have any), this system would not operate effectively, as some phases may have surplus power, while others may have power deficits.******To ensure effective control and power management in such situations, recently, new architectures and control strategies have been developed to deal with the above issues by wheeling power from low demand phases to high demand ones. However, there are no facilities at which the proposed solutions can be tested experimentally and validated under realistic scenarios. The proposed equipment will help us to construct such facilities to carry out advanced research and hands-on training of HQPs.******The availability of such a facility is crucial to ensure that the developed theoretical works/concepts can be fully validated, limitations identified, and improvements made so that the research outcome can have maximal impacts to people's lives with improved power quality and more effective utilization of renewable energy sources.******During the design for this expansion, ultimate efforts have been made to ensure that only the most essential equipment is requested by leveraging the existing facilities. The facility will be shared by four other power system researchers at Western University and their respective HQPs so that the investment from NSERC will make the greatest impacts, and will also be used to enable industrial collaborations that will bring benefits to the Canadian economy.