Collaborative Research: An Intelligent Restoration System for a Self-healing Smart Grid

The University Of Central Florida Board Of Trustees, Orlando FL

Investigators

Abstract

The overall goal of this project is to achieve a self-healing smart grid by creating an intelligent power restoration system. As such, the power system restoration remains a great concern in the evolving smart grid. The lack of online adaptive restoration tools leads to an incredibly long time for system recovery after a major blackout, due to the stochastic nature and uncertainties associated renewables such as wind and solar power resources. The proposed intelligent power restoration system is to create a self-healing power grid by overcoming the challenges that prevent electric power grid from system recovery. The advances are in the development of an intelligent power restoration system that will provide system operators with real-time adaptive restoration actions by including the use of renewable energy in the restoration process and assisting system planners to make long-term investment decisions on blackstart resources including renewable resources. This project will have a significant impact on national grid, sustainable energy and energy security. The potential economic impact is expected to save the loss of several millions of dollars that result from blackouts. The short and long term societal impact addresses national needs, especially for highly interconnected power system, in terms of sustainability, security, and reliability. Situational intelligence in power system restoration minimizes impacts of blackouts and leads to rapid recovery from natural disasters such as earthquakes, hurricanes and malicious attacks. The proposed research will promote teaching, training and learning about smart grid to graduate and undergraduate students; provide hands-on experiences to power engineers in automated power system restoration; and offer learning platform to K-12 students to cultivate the interest in power and energy systems with overarching goal of recruiting underrepresented minority, women and Native Americans students. This collaborative project proposes to apply emerging computational intelligence techniques including scalable adaptive dynamic programming based on cellular computational networks to design the power restoration system. The goals are; (1) to develop an online adaptive restoration tool using advanced scalable computational intelligence techniques; (2) investigate a novel scheme to use renewable resources in system restoration; (3) explore a blackstart unit investment strategy to improve the self-healing capability; and (4) implement and demonstrate the feasibility of new system on real-time utility power systems.