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Grid-forming Power Electronics: Modeling and Experiments

Seminar

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Location: EER 3.646
Speaker:
Brian Johnson
University of Washington

As the adoption of renewable and storage technologies continue their upward trend, power electronics are playing an increasingly prominent role in grids today. This evolution will continue as we work towards a 100% sustainably-powered grid where one day we might have a grid dominated almost entirely by electronics. To usher in this new age, we will rely on a technology known as grid-forming inverters. In essence, these are electronics interfaces that can sustain power system stability via localized voltage and frequency regulation. Such a strategy also gives communication-free power sharing, synchronization, and an ultra resilient decentralized architecture that can work under any arbitrary mix of machines and inverters. In this talk, we give an overview of state-of-the-art grid-forming control methods, their models, and experiments that showcase their operation. To underscore the promise of this technology, we will close by highlighting the newly formed Universal Interoperability for Grid-forming Inverters (UNIFI) Consortium that is being co-led by the University of Washington.

BrianJohnson

Brian Johnson obtained his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, in 2010 and 2013, respectively. He is the Washington Research Foundation Innovation Assistant Professor within the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Washington. Prior to joining the University of Washington in 2018, he was an engineer with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, CO. He currently serves as an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Energy Conversion. His research interests are in renewable energy systems, power electronics, and control systems.