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Center for Nonlinear Studies |
The electric power grid is undergoing rapid changes driven by demand growth, rising energy costs, concerns about energy security and the desire to integrate more renewable energy sources. In order to facilitate these changes a greater understanding of how they will affect both the stability and performance of the power system is required. For example, the addition of inherently intermittent renewable energy sources such as solar and wind power will affect the power balance on the grid. The nature of these resources also has the potential to make the power system more distributed through the addition of numerous small wind and solar plants. This talk illustrates the use of control and optimization based methods to provide insight into a few example problems related to the design, operation and management of the envisioned new power system. First, we discuss the use of storage to provide greater system flexibility and to mitigate the inherent variability of renewable sources. We then extend this idea to investigate the factors that drive optimal storage sizing and siting in a transmission network. The second part of the talk will briefly introduce two complementary problems. The first examines how increasing amounts of distributed generation will affect power system efficiency. In particular, we evaluate the losses associated with synchronizing a power system after a transient disturbance or in maintaining synchrony in the face of ongoing disturbances and their relationship to the network properties. Finally, we address the question of how wind farm placement affects system damping and offers control strategies to drive the frequency response of the integrated system to a desired shape. The array of problems discussed represent results and analysis for a small subset of stability and performance issues related to grid efficiency and are meant to demonstrate the fact that achieving the full potential of “smart” and clean power systems is a multifaceted problem that will require a combination of strategies.
Host: Michael Chertkov