Energy Management System for Microgrids

The research on microgrid control has been focused on power flow and optimization of energy harvest from renewable energy sources. Little research has also considered scalability of control design, so as to achieve flexibility. However, as renewable energy resources are distributed, the interconnection of a number of microgrids and their control mechanism and approaches have to be addressed. Hierarchical distributed control for distributed energy resources will be addressed within microgrids by making the microgrids intelligent and expandable. Furthermore, for safety-critical automatic reconfiguration of control layers for counteracting faults and cyber-attacks by will be studied.

Another contribution is the development of new philosophies of grid architectures, and control-based grid architecture reliability. The potential of deploying microgrids for the provision of ancillary services has not been sufficiently explored and will be addressed in this project. Power system control and power balancing opportunities for large power systems will be investigated, through developing advanced control strategies for power balancing. The optimal ICT architecture for energy management of the microgrids to support electricity trading and interconnected power system control will be developed.

The PhD candidate will analyse advanced control strategies for DC microgrid power balancing, including household level and study the role of the control architecture. In order to act at the interfaces to connected networks, demand response and control of storage and sources inside the DC microgrid/nanogrid will be considered. The PhD candidate will study how a secure and scalable decentralised control can be used in a DC neighbourhood to provide ancillary services to the network to which it is connected.

The control and balancing algorithms will be based on the physics of dc distribution grids to assure system stability and execute congestion management. The algorithms will be tested by means of simulations. These algorithms will also be tested at a small-scale dc distribution grid located at the laboratory of TUDelft.

Farshid Norouzi