ALI DAVOUDI: Hello, everybody.

This is Ali Davoudi.

I'm an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering
at the University of Texas at Arlington.
And today, I'm going to talk about control and coordination of microgrids.
So this brief introduction will discuss microgrids, which are small scale power
systems, and use different coordination control techniques for [? a part of ?]
electronic devices that build those microgrid systems.

So it's important to talk about the old paradigm,

using the nowadays power distribution grid.
So we have this huge web of networks that constitute the use
and transmission grid.
It's pretty old fashioned, hasn't changed for 100
years, although it has been the greatest engineering
achievement of the 20th century.
We have it mainly based on dirty fossil fuels, and electromechanical energy
conversions, or machines and generators.
And there is a pretty much rigid unidirectional power and control
flow that you generate power, then you transmit over long distances.
And then you distribute it at the lower voltage levels.
That's a pretty rigid control paradigm, which
does not allow for end user or customer participation.

Now we are transitioning to a new power grid paradigm, in which there

is a part and shift in both source, and loads,
and conversion setups that we have.
So the nature of the source-- and those are
changing in the 21st century-- a lot of our energy
is expected to come from renewable resources,
such as with photovoltaic or wind energy.
Department of Energy anticipates about 35% percent of electricity
to come from those green resources within 15 years or so.
Another change in the load scenario is electrification
of transportation fleets.
We already saw the new trends, and we expect
significant number of our cars to be fully electrified within our lifetime.
In a conversation domain, there's a paradigm shift
from electromechanical energy conversion, which were basically mainly
synchronous generators, into so-called power electronic inverters,
or converters, to interface those emerging renewable
resources to the main grid.

A building block for this new paradigm are

a smaller scale, or finite inertia power systems, also known as microgrids.
These are power electronics based networks,
which are a collection of loads, source, and storage
devices in close physical vicinity, which may connect to the main grid,
to the legacy grid, or be operating in an islanded fashion.
So they can be either grid connected, or islanded.
And the power electronic systems allow for bidirectional power flow
between source, load, and storage.
This active control allows end user participation,
and therefore the concept of demand response is coming into the picture.
It provides a flexible and fluid, plug and play,
controlled environment, to allow interchange
of energy between different entities, and gives rise
to the concept of prosumers, as opposed to the existing consumer concept.
Already a common theme in military applications-- for example,
electric ships are a floating microgrid, practically.
There has been a lot of application in terrestrial domains, or in society,
for example, bottom-up grid resiliency.
A lot of blackouts and brownouts that cost the US economy about $180 billion
a year happen at distribution level.
So we start at that level, see if moving toward a microgrid paradigm
can help us build this bottom-up grid resiliency.
Net-zero buildings.
There are many federal and state mandates
on moving toward net-zero building paradigms, where the building produces
its own energy that it consumes, and it can operate totally off the grid,
hence defining a microgrid scenario.
Another thing is rural electrification, especially in third world countries.

Electrification is an indication of economy development,

but 1.2 billion people do not have access to reliable electricity,
about half a billion in Africa alone.
And study after study shows that local generation and consumption
of electricity, which practically is a marker of the paradigm,
is the best solution for electrification of remote areas.

A key element here are power electronic systems.

These are energy middlewares that control, coordinate, and condition
the energy flow between sources.
That could be anything as large as scale, such as wind or solar,
or as small as scale such as radio frequency generators,
or piezoelectric generators.
And track them with loads, which can be electronic devices,
or systems that can be loads and source at the same time,
such as a storage elements, batteries, supercapacitors,
electric machines that can be generators or motor at the same time,
and grid-tied inverters or rectifiers, which
enable the power exchange between a source load or the grid.

Now, one key challenge in power electronic based systems

is control and coordination among its power electronics converters.
Conventionally, they are used as a point of load converter,
such that controllers are applied locally to serve the final load.
But that's not the optimal solution, as those converters do not
exchange information among each other.
So in that situation would be to provide a central point
that talks to every converter, gathers information, and makes decisions,
and commands those actions.
However, that requires high bandwidth, two way communication
between the central point of command and each converter,
and also given the mission and safety critical applications
domains of microgrid, existence of a single point of failure
can pose reliability bottlenecks.
Therefore, next round of research would impose probably a sparse communication
paradigm, where each converter talks to its neighbors,
and they propagate information among them to achieve certain goals.
In that regard, these microgrids define a distributed cyber-physical system,
where we have a physical system overlaid with a communication network.
Every so-called agent or entity of this physical system
has a source, either fuel cells, solar, wind,
or storage that goes to a power electronic device, which
has intelligence emitted to a controller,
and a transreceiver to transmit information
with its neighbor on a communication graph,
and achieve certain common goals.
As an example, synchrony of inverter based
AC microgrids are considered here.
You have a microgrid example, different generators
which are inverters, transmission lines, and loads.
And there are different control layers imposed on different generators.
Now, here at time equals 0, we disconnect
from the main grid, or island.
Once the this grid support disappears, the frequency and voltages
start dropping.
Now, the control-- the proposed [INAUDIBLE] control is activated here,
returns all the frequencies for 50 Hz, it's
a European microgrid with 50 Hz frequency,
and brings the voltage back up.
So it synchronizes the inverters, and shares active and reactive power
proportionality among inverters.
The has been a century long debate using AC or DC electricity systems.
Although AC has been dominant in transmission systems,
DC is making a comeback for distribution systems.
And it's easy to notice, looking at the nature of the recent sources we have,
solar, wind, or fuel cell, storage devices that we have, batteries
and super capacitors, are the type of new loads
that we are dealing with, electronics, electric vehicle chargers,
or motor drives, which all have DC nature.
Thus, moving to a DC distribution system would eliminate the extra DC to AC
to DC conversion, and saves money and efficiency.

In a DC microgrid, the control objectives

are voltage regulation and current sharing among participating converters,
which have been achieved using these distributed control paradigms,
where even removing a communication link between two sources,
or changing the load, have not affected the controller performance.
Also, removing a source, putting it back in,
did not affect the current sharing and the voltage regulation performance.