Smart Grid Seminar

Motivated by the growing interest in smart grid architectures,
we are interested in the problems of stabilization, power balancing,
optimization, and secondary regulation in microgrids. Microgrids are
low-voltage electrical distribution networks, heterogeneously composed of
distributed generation, storage, load, and managed autonomously from the
larger transmission network. Whereas traditional power system operation
and control is hierarchical and centralized, microgrids are ad hoc
networks without a centralized decision maker. These unique challenges
call for scalable, robust, and plug'n'play control and optimization
strategies with low (or no) communication complexity. In this seminar, we
study the operation of power inverters in islanded microgrids. We discuss
different decentralized primary control strategies, such as droop,
quadratic droop, and virtual oscillator control. We show how these primary
control strategies can achieve objectives such as power sharing, shaping
of arbitrary flows, or an optimal economic dispatch. We motivate the need
of additional secondary control strategies and present a distributed
averaging-based controller. Finally, we illustrate our theoretic findings
through simulation studies and hardware experiments.