Distributed Control for Distributed Energy Resources: Long-Term Challenges and Lessons Learned

Recently, the academic and industrial literature has arrived at a consensus in which the electric grid evolves to a more intelligent, responsive, dynamic, flexible, and adaptive system. This evolution is caused by several drivers including: decarbonization, electrified transportation, deregulation, growing electricity demand, and active consumer participation. Many of these changes will occur at the periphery of the grid, in the radial distribution system, and its potentially billions of demand-side resources. Such spatially distributed energy resources naturally require equally distributed control and electricity market design approaches to enable an increasingly active 'smart grid.' In that regard, this paper serves to highlight lessons recently learned from the literature and point to seven open long-term challenges facing the future design of electricity markets. They are: 1) simultaneously manage the technical and economic performance of the electricity grid; 2) span multiple operations time scales; 3) enable active demand side resources; 4) activate the power grid periphery; 5) promote synergies with interdependent infrastructures; 6) respect organizational jurisdictions; and 7) promote resilient self-healing operation. For each challenge, some recent contributions are highlighted and promising directions for future work are identified.