Grid-Forming Inverter for Renewable Energy Resource Integration

Speaker: Samir Hazra

Abstract

Recently, India accelerated solar power production to cut down coal and oil-based energy consumption. However, with the increase of solar power, the intermittency of the power supply will be high and thus energy storage such as a battery energy storage system (BESS) is required. Although the energy balance can be achieved by BESS, with higher amount of renewable energy resources (RES) including solar and wind generation and BESS integrated into the grid will create new issues.
With a small percentage (<30%) of RES of the total power of the grid, traditional current-controlled inverters can be used for integration. In such cases, the large share of synchronous generators (SG) in the network dictates the dynamics of the system and RESs play only the energy balancing role. The large SGs have high inertia and that helps in the stability of the power grid. However, with a higher amount of RES, the dynamics of the grid are no longer dependent on SG as the overall inertia decreases. Also, for the very distributed nature of the RESs the impedance of the power network increases which also deteriorates the stability of the entire power network.
A grid-forming (GFM) inverter, a terminal voltage-controlled RES, can offer solutions to integration issues. A GFM can emulate the operation of an SG thus can increase the overall inertia and can operate with a higher point of common coupling (PCC) impedance.

Bio

Samir Hazra received a B.E. (Hons.) degree in power engineering from Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India, in 2005. He received the MTech. degree from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, Kanpur, India, and the Ph.D. degree from NC State University, Raleigh, NC, USA, in 2008 and 2016, respectively, both in electrical engineering. He is currently an Assistant Professor at the electrical engineering department at IISc. He worked six years after his Ph.D. in EPC Power Corp., Poway, CA, USA, developing high-power converters for grid-tie and motor drive applications. His research interests include SiC device-based high-performance high-power converter design, Grid-tie inverter modeling and control, and Industrial motor drives. Dr. Hazra received the 2017 IEEE PELS TC6 Emerging Technology Best Paper Award and the 2016 IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics Second Prize Paper Award.