Search

To exploit the massive solar energy available in the region, photovoltaic plants have been built in the mountain areas in Southwest China, coexisting with many small cascaded run-of-the-river hydropower plants, interconnected by short-distance transmission lines. Network constraints inside these systems are often negligible. However, due to the volatile nature of solar power and the weak connection to the external power grid, without proper coordination, solar power curtailment and water spillage are inevitable. To address this issue, this paper proposes an ultra-short-term stochastic generation control method for cascaded hydropower to mitigate solar power volatility. Two technical challenges are specifically addressed: to tackle the time-varying stochastic volatility of solar power, the Itô process model is introduced; to characterize the spatial-temporal hydraulic coupling of the cascaded hydropower plants and river operation constraints, a state-space dynamic river model derived from shallow water equations is included. Followingly, a stochastic control (SC) approach for hydropower generation based on stochastic programming is proposed, where hydropower generation commands are parameterized as affine functions of measured solar power, enabling quick response to solar power volatility. Simulation of a real-life cascaded hydro-solar system and a modified system verifies the proposed control method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Converting surplus renewable electricity into hydrogen by electrolyzers has been recognized as a promising scheme to reduce renewable energy spillage and to meet the increasing hydrogen demand. However, the scheme is challenged by the inherent spatiotemporal imbalance between renewable energy and hydrogen demand. Seasonal storages and interregional hydrogen supply chains (HSCs) are commonly employed in the literature to eliminate this imbalance, but long-distance hydrogen transportation can be costly. In this paper, we incorporated the electric network (EN) into the HSC for its ability to promptly and economically deliver energy at long distances. The uniform hierarchical time discretization method is utilized to achieve the unified operation of the HSC and the EN. On this basis, an integrated HSC-EN model is elaborated upon to investigate the optimal investment and operation of electrolyzers and storage. Finally, an industrial case in Sichuan province, China is analyzed to illustrate the benefits of incorporating the EN to reduce the investment cost and improve electrolyzers’ utilization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a flexible compensation strategy for voltage source converter (VSC) connected to an unbalanced and harmonic distorted grid, which can achieve flexible tradeoff between the two common control targets, i.e., compensating the voltage at the point of common coupling (PCC), and compensating the output current of the VSC. To achieve the control target, a hybrid virtual impedance method is proposed, which uses both the feedforward of the PCC voltage and the feedback of the output current to develop the harmonic (including the negative sequence) voltage references. Compared with the conventional virtual impedance methods using only feedforward or only feedback, the proposed hybrid method can control the harmonic output impedance of the VSC in a wider range, without the potential overmodulation or instability problems caused by the conventional methods when the desired virtual impedance varies in a wide range. The effectiveness and superiority of the proposed strategy is theoretically analyzed and experimentally verified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes an improved direct power control (DPC) strategy for the rotor-side converter (RSC) and grid-side converter (GSC) of the doubly fed induction generator under unbalanced and distorted voltage conditions. The proposed scheme is implemented in a synchronous reference frame with the fixed angular speed, so that the phase-locked loop can be removed and relevant potential instability issues can be avoided. Besides, the sequential separations and complex calculations of the power compensating items can be eliminated with the direct-resonant method based on a dual-frequency frequency adaptive vector PI. Thus, the negative and harmonic components can be directly eliminated, achieving balanced and sinusoidal current injected into the power grid. Meanwhile, the control strategy can achieve self-adaptive to the grid frequency variation in the practical situation with the proposed frequency estimation scheme. Finally, the experimental results validate the availability of the proposed DPC strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the risk assessment of cascading outages, the rationality of simulation and efficiency of computation are both of great significance. To overcome the drawback of sampling-based methods that huge computation resources are required and the shortcoming of initial contingency selection practices that the dependencies in sequences of outages are omitted, this paper proposes a novel risk assessment approach by searching on Markovian Tree. The Markovian tree model is reformulated from the quasi-dynamic multitimescale simulation model proposed recently to ensure reasonable modeling and simulation of cascading outages. Then, a tree search scheme is established to avoid duplicated simulations on same cascade paths, significantly saving the computation time. To accelerate the convergence of a risk assessment, a risk estimation index is proposed to guide the search for states with major contributions to the risk, and the risk assessment is realized based on the risk estimation index with a forward tree search and backward update algorithm. The effectiveness of the proposed method is illustrated on a four-node power system, and its convergence profile as well as efficiency is demonstrated on the RTS-96 test system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]