Energy Systems Integration Newsletter: May 2020

In this edition, NREL looks at blockchain to advance solar energy security, a new educational website explores the revised IEEE 1547 standard for distributed energy resource integration, NREL awarded to research resource flexibility, and more.

NREL Supports Multi-Institutional Team, Advancing Solar Energy Security with Blockchain

With recently awarded funds from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Solar Energy Technologies Office (SETO), NREL is supporting a multi-institutional research team to advance cybersecurity systems for photovoltaic (PV) systems and devices.

The project "Multilevel Cybersecurity for Photovoltaic Systems" is part of SETO's efforts to improve solar systems' resilience to potential cyberattacks, reduce solar electricity costs, and boost solar manufacturing. NREL is leading the effort to develop a blockchain-enabled inverter control framework for grid-forming and grid-following inverters.

"The blockchain technology will provide a secure communication network for inverter-based resources, allowing those resources to seamlessly and autonomously restore the system after a blackout," said Gab-Su Seo, NREL principal investigator and engineer on the project. "This project will research, develop, and evaluate the new concept that may contribute to significantly reduced downtime by black-starting a distribution system from local inverter-based resources. By comparison, conventional, centralized systems typically require hours of downtime and manual work to be restored."

Distinguished Professor of University of Arkansas Alan Mantooth is leading the group of engineers from four universities, two national labs, and three industry partners. The team seeks to address issues such as supply-chain security, real-time intrusion detection methods, identifying and mitigating vulnerable spots, control system security, and safety protocols.

Blockchain technology is gaining traction across the distributed energy sector and at the Energy Systems Integration Facility (ESIF). As detailed in a recent NREL feature article, several project teams at NREL are evaluating the use of blockchain for transactive energy using the ESIF's power-hardware-in-the-loop capabilities. Blockchain technologies' ability to autonomously manage transactive energy decisions could help ensure the reliability, resilience, and security of the electric grid.

NREL Launches Educational Website for Revised IEEE Standard 1547-2018

A new website is available for information about the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Standard 1547-2018 for integrating distributed energy resources (DERs) into the modern electric grid. The revised standard contains detailed, updated technical specifications and configurations to help grid operators and other stakeholders operate DERs within the local power infrastructure.

The IEEE 1547-2018 Resources website provides a wealth of educational materials about the standard, including easy-to-scan summaries of technical reports, white papers, webinars, and other presentations. These resources are for utilities, state leaders, solar developers, transmission operators, regulators, policymakers, and others involved with DERs. The materials focus on multiple aspects of improving the performance of the electric grid during normal daily operations and improving grid resilience during abnormal events.

Learn more about the new IEEE 1547 Resources website.

Q&A with Daniel Bennett: A Retired U.S. Army Colonel Brings His Cybersecurity Experience to NREL

A retired U.S. Army colonel and former director of the U.S. Army Cyber Institute, Daniel Bennett, joined NREL in September 2019 to lead and advise on research for NREL's Energy Security and Resilience Center. Bennett talked with us about bringing his military experience to support research on 5G cybersecurity capabilities and NREL's cyber simulations of large energy systems to analyze and improve grid infrastructure security.

Read our Q&A with Daniel Bennett.

NREL, U.S. Air Force Collaborate on Growing Portfolio of Resilience Work

As the U.S. Air Force (USAF) continues to bolster its resilience efforts, NREL continues to grow its capabilities and expertise in this same area. NREL's partnership with the USAF has led to smarter, stronger, and more flexible base infrastructure, strengthening the USAF's ability to execute its missions worldwide.

In 2018, a team from NREL worked with the USAF to identify vulnerabilities at Florida's coastal Tyndall Air Force Base and put together a risk mitigation strategy. NREL brought its 40-plus years of renewable energy expertise to the table and presented the USAF with options featuring a strategy that included the supplementation of traditional energy resources with renewable resources in a variety of ways. The strategy was designed to boost resilience, but it also uncovered a critical need to consider the interdependence of energy systems and other systems, such as communications, transportation, food, and water. It effectively places increased importance on the surrounding community, where many base personnel have a vested interest.

Read the full NREL news story on the USAF collaboration.

IEEE Publishes NREL-Led Standard for Distributed Energy Resource Evaluation

For almost two decades, the increase in renewable energy has been catalyzed by the combination of early adopters, their setbacks, and the electrical standards that are based on those lessons. NREL has led the creation and recreation of these standards, including a significant revision to the most relevant standard for renewables, IEEE 1547-2018. Now, NREL has helped see another standard to publication: IEEE 1547.1-2020, which clarifies the test and evaluation procedures to ensure that distributed energy resources (DERs) comply with IEEE 1547-2018.

Like its parent standard, IEEE 1547.1 specifically treats the interconnection of any DER on the grid. And like its revised parent standard, IEEE 1547.1-2020 updates DER requirements to participate with the grid in more sophisticated, stability-enhancing ways. With the revised publication of IEEE 1547.1, led by NREL Senior Engineer Andy Hoke, DERs will be subject to a new set of evaluations that verify responses to voltage and frequency conditions, faults, islanding, and other power events as described in IEEE 1547-2018.

Read more on the newly published standard.

ARPA-E Awards NREL to Study Risk and Reward of Energy Resource Flexibility

The DOE Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) announced $3.4 million in project funding for an NREL-led team in a new program designed to assess the delivery risk of grid assets. NREL will collaborate with Johns Hopkins University, the Electric Power Research Institute, energy startup Packetized Energy, kWh Analytics, and industry advisors to study the implications for power system performance associated with the delivery risk of bulk and distributed energy resources.

The ARPA-E program, named Performance-Based Energy Resource Feedback, Optimization, and Risk Management (PERFORM), is about quantifying, assessing, and managing the delivery risk of all grid assets. With a risk-driven paradigm, operators can fully understand the likelihood of maintaining a supply-demand balance and assess the true value of essential reliability services.

Read the full story on PERFORM.

An NREL Research Platform is Transforming Capabilities for Cybersecurity and Power Systems Engineering

A new NREL technical report, NREL's Cyber-Energy Emulation Platform for Research and System Visualization, details a milestone capability at NREL to develop, emulate, and visualize interconnected power and communications systems for the study of cybersecurity and distributed energy.

The Cyber-Energy Emulation Platform allows researchers to virtually generate any number of energy system environments with the ability to connect to actual physical devices throughout NREL's ESIF. It also allows for the comprehensive visualization of entire distributed energy systems—utility electric grids, cities, military bases, or other communities—to allow researchers to explore the potential consequences of a cybersecurity threat, analyze its impact on the power system, and identify mitigation response strategies.

Read the full story to learn more about the report and the research platform.

NREL Report Finds That as Microgrids Multiply, Regulation Remains Unsupportive

Microgrids are arriving on the electric grid as an effective approach to manage diverse generation. But in the United States, microgrids face a difficult business environment owing to irregular power sector regulation. A recent technical report from NREL funded by the DOE Office of Electricity describes the variability of U.S. regulatory systems and how they affect different approaches to microgrid management. 

The report, titled Networked Microgrid Optimal Design and Operations Tool: Regulatory and Business Environment Study, compares four regulatory environments and their impact on different microgrid ownership types. The report considers how microgrids can be networked together in regulatory environments and concludes that the benefits of networked microgrids cannot be cost-effectively leveraged because of regulatory constraints throughout most of the United States. From the study:

"In our regulatory survey, we didn't find any environment that would support the full economic, resilience, and technical benefits that the coordinated operation of two or more microgrids could bring about."

T&D World featured a summary of the report, written by the report's authors, explaining how microgrids can move past regulatory challenges and how legislation can become more friendly to microgrid systems. Their argument is that networked microgrids can contribute to a more resilient grid, so why not investigate and implement options for them to do so.

In both the report and its summary in T&D World, the authors review specific regulatory systems across the United States and discuss the characteristics that are supportive or unfriendly toward networked microgrids. This review leads to an assessment of changes that could drive microgrid growth. Specifically, the authors mention the effort to define microgrids legislatively or regulatorily, as helpful toward reducing the ambiguity in attributes and responsibilities of microgrid owners, compared to current environments.

For future work, the authors plan to expand analysis tools to include economic calculations of ownership models and the impacts of diverse expansion planning decisions.

NREL Talks Grid Modernization on Energy Innovation Series Webinar

NREL Associate Laboratory Director of Energy Systems Integration Juan Torres participated in the Energy Innovation Series on Grid Modernization, a public webinar conducted by the CSIS Energy Security and Climate Change Program with input and support from DOE's Office of Technology Transitions. Torres sat on a panel to discuss various grid modernization initiatives and explain how each fits within the innovation chain, from basic science to commercialization and deployment.

Check out the full webinar on the event website.

Benjamin Kroposki Receives Award for Leadership in Power Distribution Systems and Microgrids

In recognition of his leadership in large-scale integration of renewable energy into power distribution systems and microgrids, Ben Kroposki, director of NREL's Power Systems Engineering Center, received the 2020 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Power & Energy Society (PES) Ramakumar Family Renewable Energy Excellence Award. This award honors leaders in energy technologies that leave a minimal carbon footprint in both national and global energy scenarios.

Kroposki has led NREL's research to develop grid-edge technologies to meet the future of the distributed large-scale electric grid. He has focused on integrating autonomous energy grids with high penetrations of renewable energy resources into large-scale power systems.

"It means a lot to be recognized for a career spent helping to grow the renewable industry by conducting research on grid integration and reducing barriers to deployment," said Kroposki.

This award will be presented to Kroposki at the IEEE PES General Meeting, to be held virtually in August 2020.