Abstract: The growing deployment of distributed energy resources can result in significant environmental and economic benefits but, at the same time, in reduced total system inertia and controllability, hence in new challenges to the power grid operation. Within this context, flexibility (i.e., the ability to adjust to the time-varying grid conditions) plays a crucial role for the transition towards power systems that can efficiently accommodate high shares of renewable energy sources. A very large number of flexible resources, such as battery storage devices, is expected to be connected to the power grid have the huge potential to provide multiple network services, e.g., primary frequency response, to the grid as a whole. However, managing flexibility in urban districts and in distribution networks requires control and optimisation tools not yet available. Novel control strategies and schemes are needed to harness their unique potential. Furthermore, there are several multi-energy systems within a district (i.e., systems with interconnected electricity/heating/gas networks), which currently lack coordination, and which can be regarded as excellent flexibility providers. There is still a very limited understanding of the true impacts of the flexibility on the power system as well as of how to devise effective frameworks for coordinating an arbitrarily large number of flexibility sources. Filling this knowledge gap is essential for the transition to a more sustainable energy grid. In this talk, promising distributed control approaches for coordinating flexible resource, which leverage advanced methods, such as model predictive control and time-varying online optimisation, and data, are outlined and illustrative case studies are discussed.

 

Biography

Alessandra Parisio (Senior Member, IEEE) received the Ph.D. degree in automatic control from the University of Sannio, Benevento, Italy. As a Visiting Ph.D. Student, she spent one year with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. She was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Automatic Control Laboratory, Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden. She is currently a Lecturer in electrical and electronic engineering with the Faculty of Engineering and Physical Sciences, The University of Manchester, Manchester, U.K. Her research interests include energy management systems under uncertainty, model predictive control, distributed optimization for power systems, the large-scale control and optimization of energy systems, and stochastic constrained control. She received the IEEE PES Outstanding Engineer Award, in January 2021, and the Energy and Buildings Best Paper Award for (for a ten-year period between 2008 and 2017), in January 2019. She is the Vice-Chair of the IFAC Technical Committee 9.3. Control for Smart Cities and an Editor of the Sustainable Energy, Grids and Networks journal (Elsevier).