US Ignite: Focus Area 1: An Integrated Reconfigurable Control and Self-Organizing Communication Framework for Advanced Community Resilience Microgrids

The United States is experiencing an increasing frequency of catastrophic weather events that inflict serious social and economic impacts. A critical issue associated with such catastrophes is the availability of electricity for the recovery efforts. Community resilience microgrids can connect critical loads in the community and share the distributed energy resources of multiple providers to enhance the availability of electricity supply during disruptions. However, community resilience microgrids are complex networked systems, and their operation can be often interrupted or halted due to the cascaded growth of failures in interconnected electrical and communications components or the unwillingness or inability of individual microgrid partners to respond. In order to enable the full functionality of community resilience microgrids, this project investigates an integrated reconfigurable control and self-organizing communication framework for enhancing operations in both grid-connected and islanded modes. The effectiveness and benefit of the proposed framework will be demonstrated and evaluated through the hardware-in-the-loop simulation and an actual community microgrid project, which will ultimately provide a model for the successful deployment of community resilience microgrids in the U.S. and beyond. In addition to including doctoral students in research and creating educational materials for the next generation operators and researchers of electrical and communications systems, projects will involve underrepresented students in evaluating social, economic, and resilience benefits of integrated control and communication approaches. Coordinated dynamic control strategies for distributed energy resources and loads of multiple owners across different timescales, together with their distinct communication requirements, are the key to the resilient and economic operation of community microgrids in both grid-connected and islanded modes. This research will address these challenges by (1) exploring a hierarchically reconfigurable centralized/distributed control strategy to optimally manage power flows of distribution lines, dispatches of distributed energy resources and flexible loads, and the voltage and frequency of the microgrid across multiple timescales; (2) investigating a self-organizing infrastructure with network topology adjustment and multi-scale data aggregation for flexible, fast, and reliable communication; (3) developing an integrated reconfigurable control and self-organizing communication framework to study the interdependency and interaction between control strategies and communication requirements; and (4) validating, demonstrating, and promoting the developed framework through the hardware-in-the-loop simulation and an ongoing community microgrid project.