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

• Published in: IEEE journal of emerging and selected topics in industrial electronics (Print) Vol. 5; no. 1; pp. 1 - 18
• Main Authors: Peng, Fang Z., Liu, Chen-Ching, Li, Yuan, Jain, Akshay Kumar, Vinnikov, Dmitri
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.01.2024; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE); Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
• Subjects: Algorithms; Alternative energy sources; Control algorithms; Control stability; Control systems; Cyber Security; Cybersecurity; Distributed generation; Distribution; Electric power demand; Electric power grids; Electronics; Energy consumption; Energy conversion; Energy Grid; Energy policy; Energy storage; Frequency measurement; Infrastructure; Knowledge bases (artificial intelligence); Literature reviews; Meteorology; Power Electronics; Power Grid; Power grids; Power system reliability; Questions; Reliability; Renewable Energy; Renewable energy sources; Renewable resources; Resilience; Resiliency; Robust control; Transmission
• ISSN: 2687-9735; 2687-9743
• DOI: 10.1109/JESTIE.2023.3343291

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 cyber-attacks. 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 paper 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 paper 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 ( he ECaB) technology. The ability of networked microgrids to greatly reduce power outages and power system restoration time is demonstrated by leveraging robust de-centralized 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 he ECaB devices and system level control algorithms.