Presented as part of the College's Summer Webinar Series
The global electricity profile currently undertakes a paradigm shift from traditionally being centralized, passive, and rigid to potentially being distributed, autonomous, and active. Proliferation of distributed energy resources (DERs), such as renewable energy resources, distributed generations (DGs), electrified transportation, and distributed energy storage systems (ESS), are widely expected to profoundly define how electricity will be generated, transmitted, distributed, stored, and traded. Future power grids with high penetration of DERs can be considered as a large-scale socio-economic system with many interacting (malicious and legitimate) entities. The heterogeneous, ubiquitous, and volatile nature of DERs has reshaped technology needs and architectures from conventionally centralized optimization to networked, autonomous, distributed/decentralized control. In this talk, we will go over needs and challenges for the proliferation of large-scale DERs, as well as economic models and control architectures to enable future reliable and resilient power grids.