There is, I think, something ethereal about i —the square root of minus one. I remember first hearing about it at school. It seemed an odd beast at that time—an intruder hovering on the edge of reality.

Usually familiarity dulls this sense of the bizarre, but in the case of i it was the reverse: over the years the sense of its surreal nature intensified. It seemed that it was impossible to write mathematics that described the real world in …

I and i

Use of model predictive control and weather forecasts for energy efficient building climate control

A communication infrastructure is an essential part to the success of the emerging smart grid. A scalable and pervasive communication infrastructure is crucial in both construction and operation of a smart grid. In this paper, we present the background and motivation of communication infrastructures in smart grid systems. We also summarize major requirements that smart grid communications must meet. From the experience of several industrial trials on smart grid with communication infrastructures, we expect that the traditional carbon fuel based power plants can cooperate with emerging distributed renewable energy such as wind, solar, etc, to reduce the carbon fuel consumption and consequent green house gas such as carbon dioxide emission. The consumers can minimize their expense on energy by adjusting their intelligent home appliance operations to avoid the peak hours and utilize the renewable energy instead. We further explore the challenges for a communication infrastructure as the part of a complex smart grid system. Since a smart grid system might have over millions of consumers and devices, the demand of its reliability and security is extremely critical. Through a communication infrastructure, a smart grid can improve power reliability and quality to eliminate electricity blackout. Security is a challenging issue since the on-going smart grid systems facing increasing vulnerabilities as more and more automation, remote monitoring/controlling and supervision entities are interconnected.

https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1315&context=electricalengineeringfacpub

A Survey on Smart Grid CommunicationInfrastructures: Motivations, Requirements andChallenges

Theory and applications of HVAC control systems – A review of model predictive control (MPC)

The significant benefits associated with microgrids have led to vast efforts to expand their penetration in electric power systems. Although their deployment is rapidly growing, there are still many challenges to efficiently design, control, and operate microgrids when connected to the grid, and also when in islanded mode, where extensive research activities are underway to tackle these issues. It is necessary to have an across-the-board view of the microgrid integration in power systems. This paper presents a review of issues concerning microgrids and provides an account of research in areas related to microgrids, including distributed generation, microgrid value propositions, applications of power electronics, economic issues, microgrid operation and control, microgrid clusters, and protection and communications issues.

State of the Art in Research on Microgrids: A Review

Virtual Storage Plant Aggregating Electrical Energy Storages and HVAC Systems Providing Regulating Reserve and Voltage Regulation

Electric vehicles (EV)s are acknowledged as key technologies to decarbonize the transportation sector and counteract variable power generation. However, in order for EVs to have an impact on the power system, a large number of them must be managed and aggregated, and this requires an efficient modeling of their charging/discharging operations. In this paper, EVs charge/discharge operations are modeled as charging/discharging events. The modeling approach is based on historical utilization of charging stations and allows individual EV owners to opt in/out of bidirectional energy exchange once they connect their vehicles to the energy network. Binary decision variables are used to monitor vehicles’ presence in the network and owner’s charging preference. The energy network is modeled using a control oriented modeling framework derived from the energy hub concept. This novel EV modeling approach is integrated into the modeling framework and used in the formulation of an optimization problem, leading directly to the design of a model predictive controller. Using this scheme, EV presence and state-of-charge can be continuously monitored and assessed, and predictions of future EV charging/discharging events can be efficiently incorporated.

Charge/Discharge Event Model for Electric Vehicles with Predictive Control Application

The concept of virtual storage plant is gaining increasing interest as flexible aggregation of distributed energy storage resources. Most of the past studies only focus on specific services that individual storage devices could provide, and there is still little understanding as to the opportunities that might arise from aggregating several different types of storage devices to provide services to diverse actors and the synergies of electrical and thermal energy storage systems. Multi-energy storage systems are considered in this paper, which consist of electrical energy storage and thermal energy storage devices. In this study a consensus-based distributed model predictive control framework is proposed for coordinating multiple multi-energy storage units, i.e., a virtual storage plant, to provide reserve services and to balance supply of on-site generation with electric demand within the microgrid. The proposed control framework is evaluated through numerical studies and its performance assessed.

Distributed Control of Virtual Storage Plants in Microgrids for Short Term Operating Reserve in UK

http://www.nt.ntnu.no/users/skoge/prost/proceedings/ifac2008/data/papers/3234.pdf

Hybrid Model for Crane Scheduling

This paper presents a novel scheme termed Optimization-based Ramping Reserve Allocation (ORRA) for addressing an ongoing challenge in Automatic Generation Control (AGC) enhancement, i.e., the optimal coordination of multiple Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESSs). While exploiting further the synergy between BESSs and slow ramping resources, the proposed scheme offers an insight into the energy-neutral operation, which is achieved by smoothly discontinuing the BESS participation along with the minimization of Area Injection Error (AIE), a variant of traditional Area Control Error (ACE). The first stage of ORRA is to incorporate Neural Networks (NNs) with the AIE in order to ensure a zero-mean of ramping reserves to be allocated among BESSs. These AIE signals are then used to formulate the optimal coordination of BESS as an online optimization problem, which is therefore feedback-driven. Finally, a distributed optimization algorithm is developed to solve the formulated problem in real-time, achieving a sublinear dynamic regret that quantifies the cost difference to the trajectory computed by a centralized optimizer with perfect global information. Consistent with the geographical distribution of BESSs, the proposed ORRA is fully distributed such that the algorithm can be executed in parallel at all nodes. Simulations on a modified IEEE 14-bus system are performed to illustrate the effectiveness and important features of ORRA.

Alessandra Parisio

Papers

Virtual Storage Plant Aggregating Electrical Energy Storages and HVAC Systems Providing Regulating Reserve and Voltage Regulation

Charge/Discharge Event Model for Electric Vehicles with Predictive Control Application

Distributed Control of Virtual Storage Plants in Microgrids for Short Term Operating Reserve in UK

Hybrid Model for Crane Scheduling

Optimization-based Ramping Reserve Allocation of BESS for AGC Enhancement