NSF Award
2408615
Recent extreme weather events and cyber-attacks on power systems have caused concern regarding the resilience, stability, and cybersecurity of the electric power supply. This directly threatens U.S.’s national energy security and indirectly threatens U.S. economy and public health and safety systems which rely on a stable and secure energy supply. In response to these imminent threats, this NSF MRI project aims to enhance the stability, resilience, and cybersecurity of the U.S. power grid by acquiring a real-time simulator that will allow the team and other researchers to study power grid dynamics and performance and develop, test, and validate new solutions. Hardening the grid against prevailing threats requires deep understanding of grid behavior and development of sophisticated technologies to enable the grid to survive stresses from natural causes or malicious attacks with minimum disruption, or, in extreme cases, to recover rapidly. This project proposes collaborative and interdisciplinary research toward the development of devices and strategies to achieve such hardening, and the acquisition of specialized equipment that emulates various aspects of grid behavior so as to enable the testing, validation, and improvement of these devices and strategies. The specific contributions of the project include (a) developing accurate power grid models with a large-scale simulation testbed, (b) enabling interactions with simulated grids in real time for protection, communication, control, and cybersecurity studies, and (c) testing and validating new solutions for enhancing the stability, resilience, and cybersecurity of the power grid. The proposed research, and the requested instrument, will not only contribute to grid hardening, but will also be an invaluable asset for training students, engineers, and the industry workforce on emerging control, operation, and protection technologies for power grids.<br/><br/>This NSF MRI project aims to enhance the stability, resilience, and cybersecurity of the U.S. power grid through collaborative, multidisciplinary research and through the acquisition of a real-time simulator that allows the team and other researchers to study power grid dynamics and performance, and develop, test, and demonstrate new solutions. The acquired instrument will lead to transformative research through (a) generating innovative and practical solutions to enhance the resilience of modern power grids against extreme weather events, and seismic activity; (b) developing components needed for a hardening of power grid cybersecurity; (c) developing solutions for seamless integration of renewable energy sources; (d) developing tools for power system protection, control, and situational awareness; and (e) developing solutions for microgrid islanding and autonomous operation capabilities in cases of severe power outages. Achieving these goals requires testing the solutions developed in the project using large-scale power grid simulations with electromagnetic transient (EMT) models and interface environments for communication, control, and protection systems to validate and demonstrate their accuracy, capability, and scalability. Research activities to be enabled by this instrument include: (a) developing fast and adaptable forming and reconfiguring of autonomous microgrids to enhance the resilience of the power supply, (b) developing coordinated operation and control for utility-scale and customer owned inverter-based energy resources to participate in grid services at scale, (c) developing a cybersecurity enhancement solutions for power grids that are robust to changes in an attacker’s objective and coordination between multiple attackers, (d) developing real-time image streaming and processing for grid damage assessment during and after disasters to enable fast power supply restoration, (e) developing solutions for optimum operation of networked electric vehicles to improve the hosting capacity of the power grid and provide a diverse range of grid services, (f) enhancing the stability of power grids through development of accurate dynamic models for power system components and real-time inertia assessment approaches. Therefore, this instrument will enable research activities that contribute to improving the stability, resilience, and cybersecurity of the power grid against extreme events and cyber-attacks.<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.
