Realizing Dispatchable Virtual Power Plants

Traditional approaches for regulating and maintaining system frequency in power transmission systems leverage primary frequency response, automatic generation
control (AGC), and regulation services provided by synchronous generators. In the
future, on the other hand, distributed energy resources (DERs) at both utility level and in commercial/residential settings are envisioned to complement traditional generation-side capabilities at multiple time scales to aid frequency regulation and maintaining a reliable system operation. Aligned with this emerging vision, this talk considers a distribution system featuring DERs, and presents a system-theoretic control strategy for DERs that enables a distribution feeder to emulate a virtual power plant effectively providing services to the main grid at multiple temporal scales. We demonstrate how power-frequency droop slopes for individual DERs can be designed so that the distribution feeder presents a guaranteed frequency-regulation characteristic at the feeder head. Particularly, the droop slopes are engineered such that injections of individual DERs conform to a well-defined fairness objective that does not penalize them for their location
on the distribution feeder. As for slower time-scale services, the talk focuses on the design of real-time feedback controllers that for DERs that enable the active and reactive power at the feeder head to track given setpoints (e.g, dispatch, ramp, or AGC signals), while concurrently ensuring that electrical quantities are within given limits throughout the feeder. The design of the feedback controllers is grounded on suitable linear approximations of the AC power-flow equations, and leverages online primal-dual gradient methods applied to pertinent minimax problems encapsulating the controllers' objectives.
Emiliano Dall'anese is Since a Senior Engineer at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Golden, CO, USA. He received the Laurea Triennale (B.Sc Degree) and the Laurea Specialistica (M.Sc Degree) in Telecommunications Engineering from the University of Padova, Italy, in 2005 and 2007, respectively, and the Ph.D. in Information Engineering from the Department of Information Engineering, University of Padova, Italy, in 2011. From January 2009 to September 2010, he was a visiting scholar at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Minnesota, USA. From January 2011 to November 2014 he was a Postdoctoral Associate at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Digital Technology Center of the University of Minnesota, USA.

His research interests lie in the areas of optimization, signal processing, power systems, and communications. Current efforts focus on distributed optimization and control of power distribution systems with distributed (renewable) energy resources, and statistical inference for grid data analytics.