PSERC S-95: Reliable fault-ride through and protection of converter-dominated power systems under unbalanced conditions

Power electronics interfacing renewables, storage, and novel transmission technologies are envisioned to be the cornerstone of tomorrow’s resilient and sustainable power systems. While state-of-the-art power converter control can replace grid-forming and grid-supporting functionalities of synchronous machines, their design typically neglects crucial aspects such as unbalanced faults and the interaction between converter protection (e.g., current limiting) and system-level protection. This jeopardizes system reliability and resilience and has already resulted in large-scale system outages and separation events. This proposal is focused on development of a framework that explicitly accounts for current limits, unbalanced conditions, and protection in the control design. The proposed approach will enable reliable and predictable fault-ride through capabilities that do not rely on heuristics, avoid adverse interactions with system protection, and retain the positive impact of grid-forming control on system-level stability when feasible.

Academic team members

Project Leader: Dominic Groß (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
Team members: Maryam Saeedifard (Georgia Tech)

Graduate students: Prajwal Dinesh Bhagwat (University of Wisconsin-Madison),
Araz Bagherzadeh Karimi (Georgia Tech), Zexian Zeng (Georgia Tech)

Industry team members

David Till (NERC), Hongtao Ma (NERC), Ben Kroposki (NREL), Kumaraguru Prabakar (NREL), Hung-Ming Chou (Dominion Energy), Aditya Jayam Prabhakar (MISO), Akshay Korad (MISO), Evangelos Farantatos (EPRI), Deepak Ramasubramanian (EPRI), Wenzong Wang (EPRI), Harvey Scribner (SPP), Thibault Prevost (RTE), Guillaume Denis (RTE), Bo Gong (SRP)