Monish Mukherjee – Dissertation Defense
About the event
Student: Monish Mukherjee
Advisor: Dr. Anjan Bose
Degree: Electrical & Computer Engineering Ph.D.
Dissertation Title: Transactive Coordination Strategies for Enabling DERs to Provide Grid Services
Abstract: The proliferation of distributed energy resources (DERs), and increasingly savvy consumers are transforming the conventional top-down approach of power system management, towards bottom-up decentralized management. The traditional electric distribution network operators (DNO) are experiencing adverse impacts of this unprecedented change, triggering significant reorganization plans. Consumer-centric market structures are evolving as a suitable alternative to coordinate distributed decision models incorporating a wider variety of participant groups that fulfil diverse and changing roles. The emergence of control techniques like transactive energy (TE) along with the advances in technologies like blockchain and cloud services have been key enablers of this visionary concept. The focus of this dissertation is to develop transactive coordination strategies and evaluation frameworks to facilitate the industry better understand the value of these market structures. Towards this goal, we make the following three major contributions in this dissertation.
First, we develop an integrated DER-to-grid coordination strategy that would integrate device-level DERs on the distribution grid to participate in wholesale electricity markets. This architecture is realized through a co-simulation framework to study the closed-loop interactions of DERs (at high penetration) with the bulk power system and evaluate the true value of such TE systems for key participants and stakeholders. Second, we propose a transactive architecture to empower prosumers through community-based coordination. An agent design scheme is presented that can determine anticipated and instantaneous flexibility of DERs. The proposed community-based coordination is solved using distributed optimization to demonstrate how such community-based markets can be effectively integrated with the distribution system operator. We also develop a co-simulation framework to evaluate the market architecture with high fidelity scenarios. Additionally, a robustness methodology is implemented to handle communication imperfections during the coordination. Third, we develop a CIM-based data integration and simulation platform by standardizing the interfaces of a utility’s existing enterprise systems. The implementation of the coordination strategies on the platform provides a proof-of-concept for the adoption of transactive applications to support future distribution systems.