Power Systems Engineering Research Center

This project addresses control & coordination of distribution system assets like DERs and hybrid PV plants with storage to provide real-time active/reactive power support to mitigate voltage instability in transmission systems over multiple timescales. A novel controller for hybrid PV plants will be developed that delivers the requested P/Q/V to the bulk grid. The control is robust to PV variability and disturbances in the grid and exploits the capabilities of DERs like storage. We will utilize physics-based data driven techniques to develop the control scheme of DERs and hybrid PV plants for mitigating the voltage instability in real-time using message-passing machine learning architecture. The control strategies will mitigate/contain inverter tip cascading during delayed voltage recovery events (seconds timeframe) and ensure a safe stability margin for credible scenarios in the next few dispatching intervals (10 min-1 hr). We will leverage existing Transmission-Distribution (TD) co-simulation platform (PSSE/GridLab-D [1] & OpenDSS) to implement proposed methodologies demonstrating their ability to mitigate voltage instability on practical systems while capturing TSO-DSO interactions. Further validation of the proposed data-drive methods will be done using a hardware-in-loop (HIL) real-time T&D test bed to ensure that controls are effective under noisy measurements & communication delay.