Symposium Co-chairs

Ram Rajagopal, Stanford University, USA.
Sara Biyaban, Intel Research, USA,
Alejandro Dominguez-Garcia, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA,
Yong Tae Yoon, Seoul National University, Korea.

Scope and Motivation

Increased penetration of intermittent renewable energy sources, such as wind and solar power, poses formidable challenges to existing power networks. An important strategy to manage this increase in uncertainty is to investigate opportunities for deploying and coordinating technologies in the consumer side. In particular, opportunities to locally deploy compact gas, coal, wind or solar generators, local storage technologies, novel power electronics devices and diverse load management opportunities can provide scalable, cost-effective and resilient solutions. Small groups of such resources can be coordinated to configure microgrids that provide energy to a self-contained group of consumers. Alternatively, such microgrids can be operated to provide various services to the broader power network they are connected into. For example, they can offer voltage support or reactive power supply services, while reducing real power draws. More generally, such microgrids can form virtual power plants. Intermittency, mobility and consumer behavior play significant roles in enabling this approach, with concepts such as charging electric vehicles, supplying reactive power from local inverters or deferring HVAC and appliance loads starting to take hold.

Architecting such systems requires investigating control and coordination mechanisms and platforms, determining what information needs to be sensed and how such sensing will be performed, and choosing communication protocols and architectures to be implemented in practice. Thought needs to be given to how layer coordination within each microgrid, as well as the hierarchical coordination of multiple microgrids. Careful data driven modeling of resources needs to be developed. Investigation on communication technologies (e.g. Wi-Fi, 4G, Powerilne), protocols and security in the context of microgrids should be considered. Robust and reliable coordination algorithms in the face of unreliable data, or highly variable and less predictable resources are also required. Integrating economic designs for coordinating independent agents in the context of microgrids need to be studied. Finally, field tests identifying the limitations of proposed approaches are very important.

We solicit papers addressing these and related issues for this symposium.

Topics of Particular Interest

Original papers are solicited on the above mentioned issues. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, all aspects of *control, data modeling and communications*, in particular:
 

• Microgrids and Virtual Power Plants (VPPs):

1. Communication and control architectures and standards
2. Modeling and simulation
3. Planning and configuration
4. Data driven modeling of resources and estimation of potential
5. Flexible power plants able to operate in grid-connected and islanded mode
6. DC microgrid networks
7. Mitigation of the variability of renewable supplies in the grid
8. Provision of frequency regulation and ancillary services

• Power electronics and devices for microgrids and VPPs:

1. Operation and control
2. New trends and devices
3. Power electronic converters with special functionalities: active power filtering, power quality, load-sharing, islanding operation, or fault ride-through.

• Protection and faults in microgrids and VPPs:
  1. Fault monitoring, location and isolation
  2. Predictive maintenance
  3. Adaptive communication-based protection
  4. Microgrids during emergency, islanding, and black start
• Control and management of microgrids and VPPs:

1. Supervision, management, security, and hierarchical control
2. Communication-based resilient and robust control
3. Power management strategies
4. Distributed and/or decentralized decision making
5. Transient and stability analysis of microgrid systems

• Distributed generation (microgeneration):
  1. Large scale integration in low-voltage grids
  2. Effects on the management of low-voltage networks
  3. Microturbines, (small) wind turbines, photovoltaic, fuel cells, CCHP and hybrid systems, for autonomous or grid-connected applications.
• Distributed storage energy systems: UPS systems, Batteries, Hydrogen and fuel cells, Compressed air devices, Superconductor magnetic energy storage, Flywheels.

Submission Guidelines

Submission deadlines and format requirements are the same for all symposia, see here.
Paper submission needs to be performed through EDAS: http://edas.info/N13823