NSF Award
2333563
The growing integration of renewable energy into the power grid via power electronic inverters has fundamentally changed grid dynamics, and caused emerging issues of sub-synchronous oscillations. This NSF EAGER project aims to understand how interconnected inverters collectively cause these oscillations, and how to design control strategies to mitigate them. The project will bring transformative changes to oscillation analyses and control by leveraging the structural properties of the underlying power network, which are radically different from the existing traditional methods. This will be achieved by developing a novel network-based framework for analysis and control of sub-synchronous oscillations. The intellectual merits of the project include new insights that will complement those obtained from current studies to provide a deeper understanding and a more complete picture of the sub-synchronous oscillation mechanism, as well as novel network-based control strategies that will help grid planners and operators in addressing this problem. The broader impacts of the project include contributing to the increasing adoption of renewable energy, which is essential for evolving towards a sustainable economy and society, and fostering multidisciplinary education and dissemination of results to academia and industry. <br/><br/>The increasing penetration of inverter-based resources (IBRs) has resulted in sub-synchronous oscillation (SSO) events in electric power systems, jeopardizing grid stability and reliability. The SSO is driven by the fast and complex control dynamics of inverters. It is challenging to understand the SSO mechanism and develop mitigation solutions in a large-scale power grid with many heterogenous IBRs due to the complex interaction between these IBRs. This NSF project will design a network-based framework for SSO analysis and control. This framework will transform a large-scale power system with many heterogenous IBRs into a set of simple subsystems for interpreting SSO mechanism and developing mitigation strategies from the perspective of power network structure. This project will advance the state of fundamental knowledge on understanding the SSO mechanism and designing mitigation strategies to support the reliable integration of large-scale renewable resources in the national grid.<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
