• Energy Research

The power system industry often operates close to its limits to accommodate the increased demand posing a high risk of blackouts. Power system restoration techniques are utilized post breakout focusing on load pickup and speedy recovery. In traditional heuristic methods, the load is considered to be constant after it is picked. However, from a system operation point of view, the load varies once picked up. This is commonly observed in industrial loads. In Industrial systems, loads, which involve many induction motors. The high starting currents of the induction motors leads to voltage sags that may affect variable speed drives and cause contactors to drop out. If the load variation and inrush currents are not considered, load will be significantly underestimated at the time of pickup which might lead to a system re-collapse. Besides, one may have to prioritize the loads to help the operator during restoration. An automatic power system restoration tool is developed using graph theory to provide an efficient restoration path and considers the priority of loads, Cold load pickup, Inrush currents, and load variation after picking up for a smooth and successful restoration process. Evolution of smart grid, the Intelligent Electronic Device (IED) has been deployed throughout the power system network for monitoring and control. Therefore, this paper takes advantages on the availability of IEDs to report the loads right before the blackout and the real-time load during the restoration. The industrial system is used as a test case to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methodology.

Power grids have recently become more susceptible to sub-synchronous control interactions (SSCI) due to the increasing penetration of renewable resources and series-compensated lines. SSCI is a purely electrical and fast-growing phenomenon. Therefore, without an expeditious detection and mitigation solution, it can cause serious damage to renewable and transmission facilities, consequently leading to cascading outages. This paper proposes an effective algorithm to detect SSCI within 45 ms and reliably send a trip signal within 95 ms. First, a comprehensive SSCI analysis is suggested to improve the preprocessing of the measured signal. Then, the proposed algorithm utilizes mode identification approaches in conjunction with a moving fast fourier transform (FFT) to capture and process the frequency and magnitude of oscillations to issue a reliable trip command in the case of an SSCI event. To evaluate the algorithm, a portion of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) grid with relatively high penetration of renewable generation resources is utilized. The proposed detection algorithm is implemented on a real-time target device and is tested with an SSCI signal from the ERCOT grid under real-time operating conditions. The results indicate the efficiency and accuracy of the method with successful detection within the acceptable time frame.

The autonomous mobility-on-demand (AMoD) system plays an important role in the urban transportation system. The charging behavior of AMoD fleet becomes a critical link between charging system and transportation system. In this paper, we investigate a strategic charging pricing scheme for charging station operators (CSOs) based on a non-cooperative Stackelberg game framework. The Stackelberg equilibrium investigates the pricing competition among multiple CSOs, and explores the nexus between the CSOs and AMoD operator. In the proposed framework, the responsive behavior of AMoD operator (order-serving, repositioning, and charging) is formulated as a multi-commodity network flow model to solve an energy-aware traffic flow problem. Meanwhile, a soft actor-critic based multi-agent deep reinforcement learning algorithm is developed to solve the proposed equilibrium framework while considering privacy-conservation constraints among CSOs. A numerical case study with city-scale real-world data is used to validate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.

With the emerging concept of sharing-economy, shared electric vehicles (EVs) are playing a more and more important role in future mobility-on-demand traffic system. This article considers joint charging scheduling, order dispatching, and vehicle rebalancing for large-scale shared EV fleet operator. To maximize the welfare of fleet operator, we model the joint decision making as a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) and apply deep reinforcement learning (DRL) combined with binary linear programming (BLP) to develop a near-optimal solution. The neural network is used to evaluate the state value of EVs at different times, locations, and states of charge. Based on the state value, dynamic electricity prices and order information, the online scheduling is modeled as a BLP problem where the decision variables representing whether an EV will 1) take an order, 2) rebalance to a position, or 3) charge. We also propose a constrained rebalancing method to improve the exploration efficiency of training. Moreover, we provide a tabular method with proved convergence as a fallback option to demonstrate the near-optimal characteristics of the proposed approach. Simulation experiments with real-world data from Haikou City verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.

This article presents a spatial-temporal demand management scheme and cooperative benefit allocation method to optimize the operation of geodistributed electric vehicle (EV) charging station and EV aggregators. Considering the spatial-temporal characteristics of the EV charging demand and energy cost distribution, we first propose a collaborative demand management model to optimize the dispatch of the charging demand and maximize the social welfare. After that, a two-stage cooperative benefit allocation mechanism based on the Nash bargaining and Shapley value theory is proposed to allocate the incremental social welfare while avoiding the conflict between individual interests and collective interests. A case study with multiple testing scenarios is provided to evaluate the performance of the proposed demand management model and benefit allocation mechanism. The numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model, which not only improves the operation efficiency of charging stations and EV aggregators but also achieves a benefit allocation solution that guarantees individual and collective rationalities.

Due to the geographic features and fruitful water resources, the distributed generation of Small Hydropower Generator Stack (SHGS) are vigorously developed in southwest China. As the more concerns about security and stability of power grids with the large amount of SHGS feed into the grid, the accurate models are critical to analyze those potential impacts. With the development of online monitoring technologies in smart grid, PMU based dynamic equivalent modeling for SHGS drawn many attentions. However, field applications reveal that traditional SHGS equivalent model may not be robustness enough to adapt the different disturbances. To overcome this deficiency, method to improve the robustness of SHGS dynamic equivalent modeling is proposed. In the paper, a coherency identification based multi-machine modeling method is introduced to enhance the accuracy of equivalent model. Sensitivity and correlation analysis based key parameters selection scheme is implemented to select the critical parameters, meanwhile avoiding the multiple solutions problem. Moreover, multi-objective optimization algorithm is designed for key parameters identification of the equivalent model. Additionally, hybrid dynamic simulation has adopted into the equivalent process to improve the computational efficiency. The effectiveness of the proposed method has been validated with an actual case from China Southwest grids.

A contactless method based on infrared image matching is presented for zero-value insulator detection on outdoor porcelain insulator string. An improved SIFT (scale-invariant feature transformation) method is developed to extract features and accomplish the pre-matching between the insulator string to be detected and the standard string in the image library. An improved RANSAC (random sampling consistency) algorithm is developed to remove mismatching points and achieve more accurate and faster detection. Firstly, an adaptive circle window is designed to improve the sensitivity of the SIFT operator on arc features extraction from insulators. Then, the dimension of the feature is decreased from128 to 32 by dividing the circle into 4 fan-shaped regions and descript the feature on 8 directions to achieve the lower computation burden and high accuracy. For the SIFT method and RANSAC method uses Euclidean distance to measure the similarity between features extracted from the string to be detected and the string in the standard library, mismatching may be caused. Spatial geometric features of the neighborhood around the feature point are used to construct the error function to improve the RANSAC method and remove the mismatching points. Faster matching is obtained by a threshold control for decreasing the number of data checking for the consensus set data models. Testing results show that the presented method is effective in the detection of zero-value resistances for outdoor insulator string. Compare with the SIFT method and SIFT + RANSAC method, the presented method has higher accuracy and faster detection speed.