System recovery through distributed energy resources
With increasing large-scale blackouts, ad hoc microgrids supplied by distributed energy resources can restore critical loads more quickly and improve system resilience, according to FRS researchers .
Extreme weather events are increasing in frequency worldwide, resulting in more large-scale power system blackouts. When critical infrastructure systems are disrupted, employing traditional processes to restore these systems tend to be long and arduous, leading to prolonged outage after a disaster.
To quickly restore energy supply to localized critical loads, using islanded microgrids supplied by distributed energy resources (DERs) may be a feasible approach. However, most studies on islanded microgrids to date require heightened situational awareness, which in itself is time consuming. Moreover, they do not consider the stochastic nature of the DERs.
FRS researchers Dr Jack Chin and Prof. Gabriela Hug have developed a data-driven contingency planning method to alleviate the disruption and enhance system resilience.The study is part of the Control, Detection and Recovery of Resilient Cyber-Physical Systems research module in the Future Resilient Systems (FRS) progrmame.
At the core of the method is the formation of ad hoc microgrids that can be promptly executed following a blackout. It considers the stochastic nature of the resources and gives operators the option of deciding the probability of supply adequacy required for the ad hoc microgrids. These contingent microgrids are computed pre-event on a periodic basis to capture long-term changes in the DERs. By reducing the size of these microgrids, the probability of non-execution due to component failure is also minimised during their formation.
The proposed method was tested on a modified IEEE European LV Test Feeder. Results show that when the intermittent supply of the resources are ignored, microgrids are forced to drop the restored critical loads more frequently. This will result in the reduction of the total critical load demand served and overall system resilience.
The study external page Formation of ad hoc microgrids for prompt critical load pickup during blackouts by leveraging stochastic distributed energy resources was published in the Journal of Engineering, 2021.