School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Pitch Perfect: Crafting Proposals That Pay Off

Modern power systems face significant operational challenges due to the accelerated and much-needed deployment of decentralized renewable generation. Such deployment has increased power imbalances leading to increased reserve requirements in power transmission grids and is causing operational issues in power distribution grids associated with the delivered quality-of-service (especially concerning voltage quality) as well as lines and transformers congestions. A potential solution to tackle these challenges is to define efficient and scalable control frameworks in active distribution networks (ADNs) capable of: (i) satisfying the local ADNs’ constraints and (ii) aggregating heterogeneous resources at different timescales to provide ancillary services to the transmission network. This work proposes a control and scheduling framework that tracks a pre-defined power profile (dispatch plan) at the grid connection point (GCP) of an ADN while ensuring that the grid states (i.e., the nodal voltages and lines/transformer power/current flows) remain within the prescribed limits. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the algorithm by field experiments on real distribution systems installed with controllable energy storage systems and photovoltaic plants as well as fast EV charging stations.