EPSCoR Research Partners Visit and Tour ACEP Facilities

ACEP's converter-dominated power system research is a collaboration with researchers from the University of Puerto Rico Mayagüez, South Dakota State University, and the University of Hawai'i at Manoa. The project brings distant people together to improve the understanding of converter-dominated power system models and the capacity to use them in research. 

The project, titled “Development and validation of models to assess dynamic response of converter-dominated power systems across multiple spatiotemporal scales,” is funded by several U.S. Department of Energy agencies, including the Office of Science’s Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research, the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy’s Solar Energy Technology Office, and the Office of Electricity Energy Storage Program under the DOE EPSCoR grant DE-SC0020281. 

Earlier this month, ACEP hosted the collaborating team in Fairbanks for a series of project presentations and research updates, and tours of the UAF power plant and ACEP's Energy Technology Facility.

The project has provided an opportunity for collaborative research between the teams and resulted in multiple published peer-reviewed papers on modeling of converter-dominated power systems. The recent visit was a chance for the team to meet in person for the first time since the start of the grant two years ago. The grant was recently renewed by DOE to continue for an additional two years of research and add our partners at the University of Hawai’i Manoa’s Hawai’i Natural Energy Institute. 

The goal of the team visit was to allow the research participants to share out the broader areas of research they are working on and to coordinate field site and model validation collaborations between the research partners. Each participating jurisdiction already has or is expected to have high penetrations of inverter-based resources within isolated, regional and continental grid scales. 

Through this project, the team seeks to develop local expertise to develop and validate modeling and control solutions to the challenges presented by converter-dominated power systems. The grid of the future will have dynamics heavily influenced by power electronic interfaces, such as inverters used to integrate renewable energy energy sources. Accurate modeling tools are essential to plan and operate a reliable electric power system. The overarching technical goal of this program is to identify the type and detail of converter models required to accurately represent power system dynamical phenomena across multiple time scales for CDPS, ranging from remote isolated microgrids to large interconnected grids.  

For more information on this research and partnership, contact Mariko Shirazi at mshirazi@alaska.edu.

 

 

The converter-dominated power systems research team outside the Energy Technology Facility’s battery energy storage system. Photo by Amanda Byrd.