Title:  Decentralized Operation and Control of Integrated Transactive and Physical Grids

Committee:

Dr. Deepak Divan, ECE, Chair , Advisor

Dr. Daniel Molzahn, ECE

Dr. Santiago Grijalva, ECE

Dr. Maryam Saeedifard, ECE

Dr. Marilyn Brown, PUBP

Abstract: The objective of this research is to develop a decentralized grid architecture to manage the physical and transactive aspects of power systems. With exponentially decreasing prices of PV the adoption of volatile and non-dispatchable sources into the grid has increased. This has two key impacts. Physical phenomenon like congestion of power flow corridors and voltage volatility become more prevalent. Similarly, with increasing prosumers, a multi-agent system is created, with each asset owner wanting to transact power. Existing transactive and physical control solutions are centralized, rely on low-latency communications, often require detailed knowledge of network topologies and are often highly coupled. The proposed research showcases fast localized grid control solutions in the form of hybrid transformers to manage physical phenomenon like congestion and voltage volatility. Furthermore, a decentralized, communication-free and topology-agnostic real-time pricing mechanism is proposed to enable collective stabilization even under wide variations in available generation. Thus, an architecture is presented where the transactive and physical grid constraints are handled in a decoupled fashion while being integrated through the physics of the network.