ANALYSIS & CONTROL OF SMART ELECTRICAL DISTRIBUTION SYSTEMS

SANJAY LALL AND DIMITRY GORINEVSKY
AERONAUTICS-ASTRONAUTICS AND ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING

This project questioned whether a high penetration of distributed generation, like rooftop solar installations, would make the electrical distribution system unreliable or unstable. The answer, thankfully, is “no.” The researchers’ model found that for tie-in inverter connection of distributed generation, the transient oscillations can remain stable and grid frequency disturbances will not be amplified, so long as the inverter controller is well-tuned. This conclusion holds for a broad range of parameter values explored in this work, including the percentage of the distributed generation and transmission line impedance. The team also studied statistical monitoring in power-generating gas turbines. They developed scalable algorithms that can process the large amount of data generated by such equipment and flag the anomalous units. Applying statistical process control methodology to the anomalies could improve reliability and energy efficiency, as well as reduce maintenance costs. The initial results were very promising. Both efforts stirred interest at GE Energy, and follow-on research discussions are underway.