Smart Grid Seminar

Power system is the largest, and arguably the most complex machine ever built by humans. Due to an inherent nature of power flows it lacks global stability and is naturally "fragile". Large enough disturbances may cause the loss of stability and trigger the cascading failures resulting in major blackouts. Aggressive introduction of renewable generation increases the overall stress of the system, so the stability constraints will likely become the main barrier for transition to clean energy sources.  Despite many decades of research, quantitative assessment of the system robustness and resilience is still the computational bottleneck in power grid operation process.
 
The talk will discuss a number of novel computationally tractable approaches for characterization of safe operation regions. After a gentle introduction to power system security and computational challenges, a new technique for construction of power flow solvability sets will be presented. This technique is based on a combination of Brouwer fixed point theorem with nonlinearity bounding approaches and provides a way of constructing families of power system solvability and feasibility certificates. Then, the discussion will shift towards dynamic problems and recently proposed Lyapunov Function will be introduced to the audience. This technique based solely on convex optimization procedures will be shown to be applicable to the design of the so-called special protection systems and identification of the possible remedial actions executed during the emergencies.  The final part of the talk will introduce an emerging technology of low voltage ad hoc DC microgrids that are a viable solution for providing electricity to 1 billion people in the world currently lacking access to power. By design, these microgrids have to be modular and maintain stability for arbitrary network topology. Furthermore, power dispatch has to be coordinated in a decentralized manner. A simple set of design criteria will be proposed that guarantees stability for arbitrary interconnection.