To reduce carbon emissions, the use of green energy has been the consensus in Europe and worldwide. For example, the UK National Grid Electricity System Operator has announced that it will be able to fully operate Great Britain’s electricity system with zero carbon by 2025. Due to the characteristics of distribution, fluctuation and intermittent of renewable energy resources, conventional centralised power system faces serious challenges. Microgrids (MG) has been proposed for better integrating growing distributed renewable power generations and energy storages, and will be basic blocks in future decentralised smart power systems.
Three-layer hierarchical control schemes have been widely used in power electronics based power systems, and the time scales of control increases with the layers. The bottom layer focuses on the local power control of interface power converters, and usually no communication is considered. The middle layer achieves cooperative power control and the top layer is for overall management of the system, both of which rely on information and communication technologies (ICT). Usually dedicated communication systems are adopted, such as optical fibre, Ethernet and WiFi, which have been widely researched and mature enough.
Due to the small size of MG, including cooperative control at the bottom layer is desirable, which will bring great advantages in system reliability and response time. However, it is a challenge since the bottom layer control is sensitive to communication delay and reliability, and many traditional communication methods are not suitable for this application. As a result, many bottom layer cooperative control methods have been proposed without communication (e.g. Droop control). A 10 million € EU JRC project “Cellular Smart Grid Platform” (CSGriP) adopts grid frequency as communication signals for power system safe and reliable operation. However, for all these strategies, the system performance is rough and limited due to the lack of data exchange among power converters and between the bottom layer and upper layers. Therefore, a new solution is urgently needed to effectively integrate reliable ICT at the bottom power converter control layer, so that information can be generated and transferred through power conversion to improve the performance of the bottom layer and provide some information for upper layers, so that the power system can be better managed. This is the ultimate aim of this Fellowship to exploit the novel titled Power And Information iNtegration Technologies (PAINT), including two sub-topics: integrated communication and power colouring, which combines the Fellow’s interdisciplinary background of power electronics and communication with the advanced communication and MG expertise of the EU hosts.
