EAPSI:Improving Electric Power Grid Resilience through a Smart-Grid-Enabled Voltage Support Framework

大规模的系统停电，如2003年东北部停电，是美国最大的灾难之一。在2003年停电的两天内，超过5000万人失去了电力，这次事件造成至少11人死亡，估计损失60亿美元。根据美国-加拿大电力系统停电特别工作组，无功支持不足是电压崩溃导致系统停电的主要原因之一。本研究的主要目标是确定分布式电力电子逆变器无功支持的最优控制策略。它有助于提高电网系统的鲁棒性、可靠性和稳定性。最重要的是，它将为分布式无功支持框架的未来发展奠定坚实的基础。这项研究将与韩国首尔延世大学智能电网研究实验室的智能电网技术和开发领域的专家Kyeon Hur博士合作进行。传统上，可以采用集中控制方案来改善配电馈线的电压分布。但是，需要充分了解系统状态以及最终用户与控制中心之间的双向通信。此外，该方案计算成本高，不易出现通信故障。在智能电网技术领域，本研究旨在开发一种基于电压测量的乘法器交替方向法（ADMM）驱动的分布式自适应控制方案。所提出的控制方案能够在可再生发电机组突然下降和负荷频繁变化等随机干扰下稳定电网电压。而且，实现这种控制只需要相邻邻居之间的通信，从而减少了通信开销并增强了系统安全性。美国国家科学基金会EAPSI奖与韩国国家研究基金会合作资助。

Large system-wise power outages such as the 2003 Northeast blackout are among the greatest catastrophes in the U.S. Within two days of the 2003 outage, over 50 million people lost power, and this event contributed to at least 11 deaths and cost an estimated $6 billion. According to U.S.-Canada Power System Outage Task Force, inadequate reactive power support is one of the primary causes of voltage collapse leading to a system-wise blackout. The principle objective of this research is to determine the optimal control strategy for reactive power support from distributed power electronics inverters. It contributes to increasing electric power grid system robustness, reliability and stability. Most importantly, it will lay a solid foundation for future advancements with distributed reactive power support framework. This research will be conducted in collaboration with Dr. Kyeon Hur, an expert in the field of smart-grid technology and development, at the Yonsei University Smart Grid Research Lab, Seoul, South Korea.Traditionally, a centralized control scheme can be used to improve voltage profile in a distribution feeder. However, a full knowledge of system states and two-way communications between end-users and the control center are needed. In addition, such scheme has high computational cost and is not prone to communication failures. Under the realm of smart grid technologies, this research aims to develop a voltage measurement based distributed adaptive control scheme motived by alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM). The proposed control scheme would be able to stabilize the grid voltages under random disturbances such as sudden drop of renewable generations and frequent load variations. Moreover, implementing this control would only require communication between adjacent neighbors, which reduces communication overhead and strengthens the system security. This NSF EAPSI award is funded in collaboration with the National Research Foundation of Korea.