PhD student Olaoluwapo Ajala with advisors A. Domínguez-García and P. W. Sauer

             The goal of the project is to enable the utilization of distributed energy resources (DERs) generation, storage resources, and flexible loads to provide frequency regulation services to the grid. We assume there is an entity, referred to as aggregator that operates (and possibly owns) all generation and storage resources and distribution assets, as well as the loads, in a small-footprint power system, referred to as microgrid. The boundaries of the microgrid are perfectly defined in the sense that its exchange of power with the rest of the system to which is interconnected occurs through a set of tie lines that is unambiguously defined (see Figure 1 for a graphical depiction). We have developed mathematical models for battery storage systems, wind turbine generators, microturbines, fuel cells, and rooftop photovoltaic systems, and we have formulated reduced-order models from these. With these models, microgrid control architectures for providing frequency regulation will be developed and tested. This research is supported by the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) NODES.

Figure: 31: Microgrid with tie lines