Research Projects

Continuous growth of renewable generation in the power network reduces system inertia. As a result, the system dynamic is changing in faster rate. For such a situation, time-varying nature and uncertain availability of renewable resources make power system control operation challenging. The synchronized data availed from phasor measurement units (PMUs) provide high resolution monitoring of the power system dynamics and are effective for the control applications. The nature of the oscillations/dynamics is changing dramatically with the grid-integration of emerging technologies, i.e., grid-following (GFL) inverters, grid-forming (GFM) inverters. Presently, these inverters are operated by using the voltage and current signals from the local point of common coupling (PCC). However, effect of the oscillations of these signals on the grid are difficult to understand by looking through the PCCs. Under such circumstances, the PMUs play an important role in monitoring the behaviour of these oscillations on the grid side. Further, the synchrophasor data from the PMUs are utilized to obtain wide area signals which can assist the local controllers of both the GFL and GFM inverters. This project can contribute to the improvement of the inverter control stability with the usage of the wide area signals. Several issues are addressed in the literature (details are available in the technical document) against the GFL control using local signals from the PCC. Different wide area logic based solutions are also proposed for the GFL and GFM inverters. Furthermore, improvement of these logics is required. It is understood from the wide area monitoring analysis that the behaviour of the responses of GFL inverter to the disturbances at the grid is significantly different than the GFM inverter responses. Therefore, coordination of these inverters is needed at the grid side to improve stability of the power network. Synchrophasor data from the PMUs can solve this challenge. To protect these data from different level of cyber attacks, the cyber-resilient infrastructure is needed. Addressing the cyber issues against the grid dynamics, an idea is proposed (accepted for publication in “Electric Power System Research” journal) for mitigating the effect of false data attack in the wide area controller. An overview of the proposed cyber resilient consensus based cooperative control technique is provided in the technical document. More detailed research in this domain is required to understand the effect of the cyber attack models on the inverter control. There are several parts of inverter control, i.e., DC side control, and AC side control. The same attack model can react with the DC side differently than the AC side, which may raise more challenging behaviour of the inverter responses and the grid dynamics. In this project, these issues need to be addressed with a rigorous analysis. Hardware validations are required to ensure the analysis outcomes.