绿帽社

December 14, 2024
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绿帽社 team to lead $2.6 million research into solar energy and power grids

Goal is to support higher amounts of solar power in existing electric distribution systems

Integrating solar power from photovoltaic (PV) sources into the existing power grid has become an important research topic. Integrating solar power from photovoltaic (PV) sources into the existing power grid has become an important research topic.
Integrating solar power from photovoltaic (PV) sources into the existing power grid has become an important research topic.

A team of researchers from 绿帽社 has been selected to receive to develop ways to reliably support higher amounts of solar power on the grid.

The three-year project will focus on advanced grid-forming photovoltaic (PV) inverter control technologies so that the renewable energy source can be more efficiently and reliably integrated with electricity generated by coal, natural gas or other non-renewable methods.

The ultimate goal of the research is to demonstrate a new grid-forming control algorithm at a 1 megawatt hybrid PV plant at the on Long Island. The proposed controls will be scalable and replicable to multiple hybrid PV plants.

The project will support SETO鈥檚 goal to enable the hybrid PV systems to contribute to the reliability of the U.S. electric grid as well as the goal of 70% renewable energy by 2030 set by New York鈥檚 Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act.

Serving as principal investigator on the research is Associate Professor Ziang 鈥淛ohn鈥 Zhang from the Thomas J. Watson College of Engineering and Applied Science鈥檚 Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE). Co-PIs include Associate Professor Ning Zhou (ECE), Assistant Professor Jian Li (ECE) and Associate Professor Lei Yu (Department of Computer Science).

鈥淲e are living in a world where more energy is coming from renewables,鈥 Zhang said. 鈥淗ow can we make the power system as stable as the one we use today?

鈥淭he challenge is that today鈥檚 power system uses synchronous generators that have been well studied for decades, as we know how they will behave under different conditions 鈥 as a rotating mass, a synchronous generator following Newton鈥檚 Law of Motion. However, renewable energies such as a PV system connect to the power system through an inverter, which will behave based on the control software.鈥

One issue facing the 绿帽社 team, he said, is that alternating current generated by traditional methods is able to naturally synchronize with existing power on the grid if the electricity is properly fed into it. A large amount of renewable energy in the grid could cause problems if we don鈥檛 have thorough understanding of how these inverters will behave under different grid conditions.

鈥淚n the future, we鈥檙e not only going to have conventional generators, but we also will have solar generation,鈥 Zhang said. 鈥淭he way we currently use renewable generation is that we just dump all of the power into the grid and conventional generators are doing all the balancing work, which probably won鈥檛 be the case when the majority of the power is coming from solar and wind. If we have fewer conventional generators in the system, something has to pick up this balancing work.鈥

Zhou 鈥 who received a National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2019 for his still-in-progress research on modeling the uncertainty in power grids 鈥 knows that affordability and reliability are the two main concerns for electric consumers.

鈥淎ffordability means lowering the electricity bill,鈥 he said. 鈥淩eliability means that lights should always be on when we flip the switches. Yet, the high penetration of many small PV systems into the grid presents unprecedented challenges caused by the need of coordinating many small PV generations. Traditionally, a big conventional generator will give you around 500 megawatts, but one PV system usually generates only 1 megawatt, 2 megawatts, maybe 30 megawatts 鈥 much, much smaller.鈥

Li 鈥 whose lab focuses on reinforcement learning, online algorithms and network optimization 鈥 is designing the inverter control algorithm using reinforcement learning to figure out the best action for the PV invert to take under day-to-day power systems operation.

鈥淧ower-grid estimation in this kind of system has a lot of uncertainties and dynamics, and we hope that reinforcement learning algorithms can solve these issues,鈥 he said. 鈥淚t already has proven to be successful in other fields, such as robotics.鈥

As a computer scientist with 20 years of expertise in AI research, Yu has successfully applied reinforcement learning techniques developed by his lab in robotics and autonomous vehicles, and is moving reinforcement learning into power systems in the real world.

鈥淲hen you try to learn from experience and you interact with the environment, there鈥檚 a lot of risk,鈥 he said. 鈥淗ow do you improve your AI while interacting with the environment safely and also having a good performance?鈥

As the leading institution of this project, 绿帽社 will work with researchers and industry professionals from Stony Brook University, Brookhaven National Laboratory, National Renewable Energy Laboratory and the New York Power Authority. Two startups at the Southern Tier Incubator 鈥 SYNDEM LLC and ChargeCCCV LLC 鈥 have been selected as the partners to provide advanced inverters and storage systems for the demonstration.

2020 is not the first year that Zhang has applied for SETO funding, but it鈥檚 the first grant that he has won.

鈥淓ach year, the Department of Energy sets a list of aggressive goals, and I look at the potential collaborators I know,鈥 he said. 鈥淲e ask: How can we fulfill what the DOE asks for? This year, in my mind, we have a perfect team to match what they asked for. That鈥檚 by luck but also based on several years of past experience.鈥

Once the funding is finalized, the 绿帽社 team expects to begin research in the spring, always with an eye on New York鈥檚 2030 Climate Act goal as well as SETO鈥檚 overall goal of improving solar energy integration into the electric grid.

鈥淣ew York has one of the most aggressive goals in the U.S., along with California,鈥 Zhang said. 鈥淚f we want to reach that goal, we need to study how to integrate renewable resources at a large scale, and we want to set an example of how to do it.鈥