Grid Forming Inverters for Spinning Reserve in Hybrid Diesel Microgrids

The ability to robustly characterize transmission and distribution grid resilience requires the ability to perform time-scale analysis that interweaves communications, control, and power contributions. This consideration is important to ensuring an understanding of how each individual aspect can affect the resulting systemic resilience. The combination of co-simulation of these time-based characteristics and a resilience-specific metric provides a likely method to inform both design planning and implementation/operational goals to ensure resilience in power systems. The Microgrids, Infrastructure Resilience, and Advanced Controls Launchpad co-simulation platform (MIRACL-CSP) has been developed to allow the modular integration of power grid models with control and metrics applications. This paper introduces MIRACL-CSP as a fundamental platform to study and improve the resilient operation of a microgrid. It offers a holistic investigation environment for systemically comparing the cyber-physical resilience to natural and manmade events. We emphasize the importance/advantage of intertwining the distribution system simulator GridLAB-D with the Power Distribution Designing for Resilience (PowDDeR) application to analyze the resilience of the St. Mary's microgrid in Alaska. The resilience is evaluated in both short-term (frequency stability) and long-term (energy constrained) metrics. The results of the analysis of the St. Mary's microgrid show that there is a trade-off between the two. As inertia-based generation assets are taken off-line, shortterm resilience drops. However, the long-term resilience is retained longer as less fuel is being used.

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“…Schematically illustrated as a single-line diagram in Fig. 3, the St. Mary's power distribution feeder details can be found in [25] and [26].…”

Section: A St Mary's Use Casementioning

confidence: 99%

Scalable Resilience Analysis Through Power Systems Co-Simulation

et al. 2023

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“…In the analysis of the St. Mary's distributed wind project, the valuation framework from [12] was used to identify the various benefits applicable to the remote Alaskan village and the electric co-op that serves it. After identifying the value streams that are applicable to isolated FTM systems, a sub-selection of benefits was further identified as being specifically applicable to the St. Mary's project, given the characteristics of the cooperative and the wind turbine, described in prior studies and reports [33,35,40,41].…”

Section: St Mary's Benefitsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Valuation of Distributed Wind in an Isolated System

et al. 2021

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Remote communities are increasingly adopting renewable energy, such as wind, as they transition away from diesel energy generation. It is important to understand the benefits and costs of wind energy to isolated systems so that decision-makers can optimize their choices in these communities. There are few examples of valuation of wind energy as a distributed resource and numerous differences in valuation approaches, especially in the inclusion of environmental and economic impacts. We apply a distributed wind valuation framework to calculate the benefits and costs of wind in St. Mary’s, Alaska, to the local electric cooperative and to society, finding that the project does not have a favorable benefit-to-cost ratio unless societal benefits are included, in which case the benefit-to-cost ratio is nearly double. Government funding is important to reducing the initial capital expenditures of this wind project and will likely be the case for projects with similar characteristics. Additional fuel savings benefits are potentially possible for this project through technological additions such as energy storage and advanced controls.

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“…Previous transient analysis of the St. Mary's grid have modeled the GBS providing spinning reserves and regulation and showed that it can reduce voltage deviations and the frequency nadir of the system [5], [6] and that a WTG can be used to provide frequency regulation and damping support in wind-diesel microgrids [7], [8], [9].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

MicroGrid Renewable Integration Dispatch and Sizing (MiGRIDS) Analysis of Spinning and Regulating Reserve Options for Wind in an Alaskan Diesel Microgrid

VanderMeer,

Green,

Darbali-Zamora

et al. 2023

IEEE Access

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St. Mary's is a remote, isolated, Alaska microgrid that relies on diesel generation. Recently, a wind turbine generator (WTG) with a rated capacity just below system peak load was installed to help reduce diesel fuel consumption. With this WTG, St. Mary's could significantly reduce their fuel consumption and run significant amounts of the year without any diesel generators (DG) online ("diesels-off"). However, wind power needs to be covered with spinning reserve capacity (SRC) and regulating reserves. Since there are no other sources, this needs to come from the DG, which does not allow them to turn offline and reduces the amount of potential fuel savings. The Alaska Village Electric Cooperative (AVEC) has invested in a "Grid Bridging System" (GBS), an energy storage system meant primarily to provide SRC and regulating reserves to allow the DG to go offline, scheduled to be installed in 2023. This paper uses the open source Python-based software tool Micro Grid Renewable Integration Dispatch and Sizing (MiGRIDS) to investigate the benefits and impacts of several methods to reduce or replace SRC and regulating requirements on the DG. These include optimizing SRC requirements, adding a GBS to the system, using short-term wind forecasting and using a fast acting controllable thermal energy storage system (TESS). The GBS resulted in the greatest fuel savings. Optimizing SRC and short-term wind forecasting resulted in a small decrease in fuel consumption on their own, but in combination with a GBS resulted in a much greater reduction. Finally, the TESS was was able to regulate a poorly controllable WTG so that it behaved similar to a highly controllable WTG, at some expense to wind import.INDEX TERMS microgrids, renewable energy, energy storage, grid forming inverters

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Grid Forming Inverters for Spinning Reserve in Hybrid Diesel Microgrids

Cited by 5 publications

References 8 publications

Scalable Resilience Analysis Through Power Systems Co-Simulation

Scalable Resilience Analysis Through Power Systems Co-Simulation

Valuation of Distributed Wind in an Isolated System

MicroGrid Renewable Integration Dispatch and Sizing (MiGRIDS) Analysis of Spinning and Regulating Reserve Options for Wind in an Alaskan Diesel Microgrid

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