Autonomous Microgrid Restoration Using Grid-Forming Inverters and Smart Circuit Breakers

Conference · Sun Jul 17 00:00:00 EDT 2022 · 2022 IEEE Power & Energy Society General Meeting (PESGM)

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1109/pesgm48719.2022.9916679· OSTI ID:1989333

Banerjee, Abhishek ^[1]; Pandey, Amit ^[1]; Pailla, Uttam Reddy ^[1]; Seo, Gab-Su ^[2]; Shekhar, Shashank ^[1]; Jain, Himanshu ^[3]; Lin, Yashen ^[2]; Wu, Xiaofan ^[1]; Bamberger, Joachim ^[1]; Muenz, Ulrich ^[1]

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1. Autonomous Systems and Control, Siemens Technology,Princeton,NJ,USA,08540
2. Power Systems Engineering Center, National Renewable Energy Laboratory,Golden,CO,USA,80401
3. Indian Institute of Technology,Department of Hydro and Renewable Energy,Roorkee,India

The proliferation of distributed inverter-based resources (IBRs) raises the questions if these IBRs can be used to blackstart microgrids and distribution feeders after major outages. In this paper, we propose and evaluate an autonomous microgrid restoration concept using grid-forming (GFM) IBRs and smart circuit breakers (SCBs). The concept is first explored in simulation platform and then a hardware testbed containing actual GFM inverters is developed to demonstrate these functionalities. A combination of dispatchable virtual oscillator control (dVOC) and droop-based control schemes have been designed for GFM inverter controls in the software simulations and hardware testbed. Subsequently, operation of SCBs using two distinct principles have been demonstrated that can restore or connect portions of the network.

• Research Organization: Siemens Corporation
• Sponsoring Organization: U.S. Department of Energy
• DOE Contract Number: EE0008769
• OSTI ID: 1989333
• Journal Information: 2022 IEEE Power & Energy Society General Meeting (PESGM), Journal Name: 2022 IEEE Power & Energy Society General Meeting (PESGM)
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English