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Smart Inverter Grid Support Functionality – Time to be Proactive
Date: Thursday, November 21st, 2013
Location: SRP Information Services Building (ISB), 1600 N Priest Dr, Tempe, AZ 85281
Speaker: Aminul Huque, EPRI
Topic: "Smart Inverter Grid Support Functionality – Time to be Proactive"
The greater adoption of distributed energy resources, especially photovoltaics (PV) systems interconnected at the distribution feeders, is instigating several grid management challenges including violation of ANSI voltage limits and higher switching of cap banks, load tap changers, and voltage regulators. Often utilities are limiting aggregate PV installation on a feeder to conservative levels in order to avoid potential grid instability. They are also frequently requiring expensive protective measures like direct transfer trip. However, PV and energy storage inverters are capable of delivering grid supportive functionalities like reactive power support, active power curtailment, watt-frequency, and low/high-voltage, and frequency ride through, to mitigate problems caused by higher penetrations of variable generation sources like PV. The primary learning objective of this presentation will be to raise audience awareness about the advanced grid-supportive functionalities that can be made available to utility distribution system operators through grid-connected PV and storage smart inverters. The audience will be exposed to field measured data showing potential feeder voltage stability and other control issues under high penetration PV scenarios. Attendees will be able to recognize the importance of adopting open standards and communication protocols to integrate smart inverters from different manufacturers with utility distribution management systems.
Speaker Bio:
Aminul Huque is currently working as Project Manager at the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI). His research at EPRI focuses on power converters for distributed energy resources (DER) which includes smart-inverters, grid codes, uses of energy storage for PV intermittency mitigation, energy performance analysis, and outage support by residential PV systems. He is currently managing several smart-inverter related projects including one funded by DOE. Aminul received a PhD from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville (Tennessee, USA), and an MSc from the Imperial College London (London, UK) in 2010 and 2003 respectively.
