Position Paper - Using Microgrids as a Path Towards Smart Grids

M.D. Lemmon University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, IN, USA lemmon@nd.edu 1. Position Statement Smart Grids represent a vision for the future of power distribution in which grid stability and reliability are enhanced through recongurable control schemes operating across a wide range of temporal and spatial scales. Smart grids use a network of computers to control the grids generation, load, and distribution assets. These computers communicate over large-scale communication networks. These computer networks provide tighter and faster coordination of geographically distributed grid components in a way that hopefully enhances overall grid reliability. We use the word hopefully because the improper use of networked control can also degrade overall system stability. Communication networks have throughput limitations that constrain how much information may be realistically passed between cooperating grid components. Limiting a control systems feedback information can easily degrade overall system stability. This is particularly true in large-scale systems where the sheer number of subsystem interactions make it difcult to anticipate all possible scenarios that lead to grid collapse. This means that there is great uncertainty in accurately assessing the impact smart networked control schemes might have on grid reliability and stability. A major challenge in crafting a cyber-physical systems (CPS) initiative for the electrical power industry lies in nding a way to reduce these uncertainties. There are two ways of reducing these uncertainties. The rst involves narrowing our scope to a problem that can be realistically solved in the near term. The second avenue uses incremental approaches in applying our methods to the entire grid. In our opinion, a realistic place to start is with low power microgrids. We feel that the prior work weve done with microgrids provides an incremental approach that can help build industrys condence in the benets of smart grids. This approach allows for the emergence of the smart grid from the existing legacy electric grid through an evolutionary and organic transformation. Such organic transformation processes are inevitable in evolution of infrastructure systems such as the electric grid, since it cannot be turned off for a process upgrade. Prior Work on Microgrids: Microgrids [9] are power distribution networks in which users and generators are in close proximity. Generation technologies include renewable microsources such as photovoltaic cells or wind turbines, as well as fossil fuel systems with efcient waste-heat recovery. The microgrid is often connected to the main power grid through an intelligent coupling switch. While several approaches for integration of microgrids are under development, we have been working on a two-level networked controller. The rst level uses local microsource controllers [9] developed at the University of Wisconsin Madison for their CERTS (Consortium for Electric Reliability Technology Solutions) microgrid. The second level consists of a group of networked computational agents that supervise the generation assets and loads connected to the grid. The CERTS microsource controllers are used in the lowest level of our control architecture. These controllers are based on power-frequency and reactive power-voltage droop characteristics. This approach ensures stable microgrid operation, enabling us to overlay additional layers of operational detail, including protection, safety, and metering, on top of these low level controllers. Furthermore, the principle of droop based control is compatible with operation of price signaling, energy storage devices and load control devices [12, 6, 14]. The top level of the architecture consists of intelligent agents that communicate over a wireless mesh radio network. These agents control power dispatch and load shedding by solving certain optimization problems in a distributed manner. The form of these optimization problems is similar to those found in [3, 4, 8, 7] that have been used for optimal microgrid restoration. Our implementation maximizes generation (load) power subject to distribution constraints. The novelty in our work lies in its use of a distributed 1 G. Venkataramanan University of Wisconsin Madison, WI giri@engr.wisc.edu P. Chapman University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, IL patrick.l.chapman@gmail.com

optimization strategy similar to what has been successfully used in Internet [10] congestion control. Another novelty lies in our use of an event-triggered approach [13] to communication between cooperating agents. Experimental work has shown that event-triggered communication reduces, by several orders of magnitude, the amount of information that needs to be transmitted between agents. Were at a point where these schemes can now be implemented on a small scale microgrid at the University of Wisconsin. This approach provides a way to address important CPS issues arising out of limited communication throughput. By studying how this approach scales on microgrids, we can better understand how well suited they may be to the entire grid. Cyber-Physical Systems and Microgrids The microgrid control architecture described above is a cyber-physical system that uses a network of embedded controllers to manage a spatially-distributed system. The integration of these computational agents into the electrical grid raises a number of issues that must be addressed in an incremental manner before we can successfully integrate such agents into the national grid. There is a fundamental question regarding the scalability of the CERTS microsource controllers. Small-scale testbeds have shown that the CERTS droop controllers can effectively regulate small microgrids. Recent investigations, on the other hand, have identied instabilities occurring when we interconnect microgrids in certain limiting cases [5, 1]. These studies suggest that some care must be taken when we scale up the proposed two-layer control architecture. How these stability boundaries are related to grid topology and how high level supervisory agents can be used to monitor and manage such stabilizing topologies is an issue that must be addressed before applying smart-grid technologies to the national grid. As mentioned above, the microgrid studies being pursued by this group provide a way of incrementally investigating the scalability of the CERTS controllers. The proposed microgrid controller architecture distributes intelligence throughout the grid. This has the potential of reducing the cost of the communication infrastructure, since generation assets and loads do not send their information to a single centralized computer. On the other hand, distributed management over digital communication networks raises a number of fundamental issues regarding the quality of the data streams between neighboring computational agents and the impact such stream quality has on the global performance of the grid. In particular, mismatches between the clocks of the agents computational processes and the grids physical processes can introduce artifacts into data streams. Examples of such artifacts include the out-of-order delivery of time-sensitive data, the dropping or duplication of data. Such artifacts can have a dramatic impact on the correctness of the control and management algorithms being executed by the computational agents. The impact that such artifacts have on the stability of the grids physical processes is poorly understood, especially as we scale up the number of agents. This important issue must be well understood before we attempt to apply such multi-agent control architectures to the national grid. Microgrids, in our opinion, provide an excellent starting point from which we can incrementally build up to national-scale deployments of the technology. Another important issue regards the use of wireless communication in multi-agent systems. We have suggested implementing the top layer of the control architecture over a mesh radio network. Such deployments reduce the deployment cost. The resulting wireless infrastructure is less susceptible to disruptions due to downed communication lines. Wireless communication technologies, however, have limited and time-varying throughput. Such throughput variations can effect overall grid performance by reducing the information owing between agents. We need a better understanding of how such interactions between network throughput and grid stability scale as a function of network size and topology. In addition to this, there are fundamental issues regarding the security of such wireless networks specically regarding their susceptibility to denial-of-service attacks. The roll-out of smart-grid technology must not only be reliable to environmental hazards, it must be secure from intentional or un-intentional disruption of network communication. Finally there is an issue regarding the development of suitable interconnection standards for the electrical grid. There appears to be a consensus that the current IEEE 1547 standard [2] specifying grid interconnection may be poorly equipped to deal with the roll-out of smart-grid technologies [11]. In this regard, a better

understanding of how cyber-physical systems impact grid stability and reliability may be instrumental in guiding future drafts of this IEEE standard. Final Remarks The anticipated deployment of smart-grid technologies on the national grid must be done with some care. We favor an incremental approach that starts by studying smart-grid technologies (such as our proposed two-layer control architecture) to low power microgrids. This approach allows us to more easily study the scalability of multi-agent control architectures for electrical grids. We can then use those insights to identify a roadmap that reliably scales up smart-grid technologies to the national grid.

References
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