Carnegie Mellon Electricity Industry Center

Extreme weather events may lead to prolonged outages in distribution systems, highlighting the need for innovative blackstart and restoration approaches. The increasing penetration of distributed energy resources (DERs) provides an opportunity to blackstart distribution systems without relying on transmission systems, thus, significantly accelerating load restoration and boosting grid resilience. This talk will present a holistic bottom-up blackstart and load restoration framework leveraging battery energy storage (BES)-based grid-forming inverters (GFMIs) and solar energy-based grid-following inverters (GFLIs). The proposed framework initiates blackstart with multiple GFMIs to form microgrids, sequentially expands the boundaries of islanded microgrids while establishing cranking paths to GFLIs, synchronizes microgrids to form larger islands, and finally synchronizes with the transmission grid to complete the restoration process. The proposed framework is validated using the IEEE-123-bus system, with different numbers of GFMIs and various transmission grid recovery times. Additionally, this talk will briefly introduce our project to convert the City of Montezuma to be Iowa’s first renewable microgrid with blackstart and self-healing capabilities.

Zhaoyu Wang received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical and computer engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology. Since 2015, he has been assistant, associate, and full Professor at Iowa State University. His research interests include optimization and data analytics in power distribution systems and microgrids. He was the recipient of the National Science Foundation CAREER Award, the IEEE Power and Energy Society (PES) Outstanding Young Engineer Award, the Northrop Grumman Endowment, College of Engineering's Early Achievement in Research Award, and the Harpole-Pentair Young Faculty Award Endowment. He is the lead Principal Investigator for over $23M projects funded by the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, National Laboratories, PSERC, and Iowa Economic Development Authority. He is the Technical Committee Program Chair (TCPC) of IEEE Power System Operation, Planning and Economics (PSOPE) Committee, the Vice Chair of IEEE Distribution System Operation and Planning Subcommittee, the Secretary of IEEE Task Force on IEEE P3102 Standard for Conservation Voltage Reduction (CVR) Data Collection and Management Procedures, and the Vice Chair of IEEE Task Force on Advances in Natural Disaster Mitigation Methods.