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Envisioning the Future Renewable and Resilient Energy Grids—A Power Grid Revolution Enabled by Renewables, Energy Storage, and Energy Electronics

Journal Article · · IEEE Journal of Emerging and Selected Topics in Industrial Electronics
Today’s power grids are facing tremendous challenges because of the ever-increasing power demand, system complexity, infrastructure cost, knowledge base, and policy and regulatory issues to achieve supply–demand power balance and resiliency with respect to more frequent extreme weather events and cyberattacks. It is particularly challenging when the transition toward 100% intermittent renewable energy sources is considered. Many countries are calling for building up more transmission and distribution lines to increase power delivery capacities. This article is an attempt to answer two urgent questions: Is more transmission and distribution infrastructure really needed to meet the increasing power demand? What kind of future grid infrastructure should we envision and build? This article attempts to answer these questions and proposes the concept of community-centric asynchronous renewable and resilient energy grids. By clearly differentiating the concepts of grid resilience and reliability, the importance of building resilient power electronics’ devices and robust system-level control algorithms to achieve 100% renewable energy integrated resilient grids is presented. To identify the shortcomings and propose advancements, power electronics’ technologies are categorized using the proposed concepts of natural source frequencies (NSf), energy storage, direct energy conversion/control and fault protection (DeCaFp), and high-efficiency energy consumption and buffering (heECaB) technology. The ability of networked microgrids to greatly reduce power outages and power system restoration time is demonstrated by leveraging robust decentralized and centralized control algorithms, identified through a comprehensive literature review. Future research areas are proposed to further enhance grid stability, controllability, cybersecurity, and protection against faults in the presence of 100% renewable sources by leveraging the advanced capabilities of NSf, DeCaFp, and heECaB devices and system-level control algorithms.
Research Organization:
Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE; USDOE Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE), Renewable Power Office. Solar Energy Technologies Office
Grant/Contract Number:
EE0009340; EE0010427
OSTI ID:
2279100
Alternate ID(s):
OSTI ID: 2279101
OSTI ID: 2283408
OSTI ID: 2999025
Journal Information:
IEEE Journal of Emerging and Selected Topics in Industrial Electronics, Journal Name: IEEE Journal of Emerging and Selected Topics in Industrial Electronics Journal Issue: 1 Vol. 5; ISSN 2687-9735
Publisher:
IEEECopyright Statement
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English

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