Societal changes have put much pressure on conventional means of generating electricity. Initial studies indicate that these developments will create additional challenges on current generation through increased cycling, ramping and assuring reserve requirements. New types of resources are anticipated to grow in their market size, including energy storage and price-responsive demand resources that are more flexible than traditional response programs.  New generation sources are being developed with a heavy emphasis on renewables such as photovoltaic (PV) solar systems and wind-based generation.

However, these sources present many challenges to the reliability and operation of the power grid due to their intermittency and ultimately in uncertainties in their capacity. The integration of large-scale storage with these renewable resources requires much research, development and demonstration. In this theme of research, optimal strategies to manage distributed resources with integrated storage will be developed and demonstrated.

Research areas will broadly cover:

  • Integration of PV resources to the grid
  • Integration and Optimization of energy storage resources
  • Automatic adaptive computing for grid operations
  • Scheduling and operation of variable generation resources
  • Identification of strategic changes in power grid operations (such as commitment schedule, regulating capacity, ramp rates, frequency response capability)
    • Control and optimization approaches including variations in active and reactive powers from variable energy integration impacts on transmission system operation
    • Impact of energy storage and demand response
  • Control and optimization approaches including variations in active and reactive powers from variable energy resources at different time scales
  • Develop a library of feeder models for research
  • Optimization of PV+ Storage for various economic scenarios
  • Develop O&M Test plans for batteries
  • Economic justification of location specific incentives for
    • DR
    • EV Charging
    • Home battery
  • Advanced energy storage technology development
  • High performance computing for grid operators
  • Controlling the output of wind and solar generations using
    • Advanced battery technologies
    • Power electronic technologies
    • Conventional (gas/hydro) generation
  • Control Center Operations
    • Including asset health into EMS calculations
    • Prediction of instability based on asset health
    • Contingency analysis and asset health
  • Distributed CHPs
  • PV plus storage
  • Demand response and virtual storage
  • O&M and life cycle concerns of energy storage (SOC, SOH)
  • Control and operations center visibility of distributed generations and behind meter generation and storage
  • Modeling of CHP, generation, storage
  • Integration of storage
    • Location, sizing, and performance optimization
  • Fast resource forecasting
  • Evaluate storage on business case and stacked values
  • SCADA and EMS integration to DG and storage on distribution systems
  • Alternative to storage
    • Just in time generation
  • Optimizing stack values
    • The value stream for energy storage
  • HPC vs Distributed Computing
  • Cyber security impacts to all aspects