PFI (MCA): Enhancing Grid Reliability and Stability with Distributed Energy Resources

Regents Of The University Of Michigan - Dearborn, Dearborn MI

Investigators

Abstract

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Partnerships for Innovation – Mid-Career Advancement (PFI-MCA) project is to make the US national power grid more reliable and stable. At the same time, this project looks to handle a large number of distributed energy resources that connect to the grid in different ways than traditional power plants. One of the key goals is to gather fundamental knowledge that will help better assess the reliability of US power grid in real-world conditions. Another goal is to develop novel control algorithms to enable distributed energy resources to react better to changes in the grid, which can help improve overall grid stability. This project also plans to create a shared platform that many research groups can use for testing their research ideas. This work will help strengthen relationships between the university and industry by working together for mutual benefit. All project materials, processes, designs, and results will be disseminated in the public domain via public-access websites, top-ranking conference and journal publications. Lastly, this project will positively impact the society and education by offering valuable research opportunities for students who don't typically get involved in STEM, thus helping to diversify the people working in these fields. The proposed project is to develop multidisciplinary and integrated approaches to collectively improve low-inertia grid reliability and stability in the face of uncertainties and to explore a commercialization roadmap. The proposed research will have intellectual merits in the following areas: (1) Establish a fundamental knowledge base of understanding the practical challenges of low-inertia power grids with high penetration of grid-forming inverter-based energy resources, (2) Design a holistic assessment framework and visualization tool to qualify the causal reliability relation between diverse grid-forming inverter-based energy resources and their collective impact on system reliability, (3) Develop a self-adaptive, robust, and stability-aware grid-forming controller capable of learning power grid behaviors, and (4) Leverage the existing power system testbeds to validate the real-world performance of the proposed stability-aware grid-forming controllers and enable research resource sharing among the resources-constrained research and education community in Southeast Michigan. 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.