Secure and Stable Operation of Fluctuating Sustainable Power Systems

Stable and secure power systems are of fundamental importance to modern societies and will continue to be so in the future. The global challenges to electric power systems in the coming decades are great where enhanced focus is on energy supply with a minimal dependency on fossil fuels to fulfill ambitious goals for greenhouse gas emission set by governments in various countries around the world. To meet these goals will require a large share of the electric power production to be based on sustainable energy sources. A power production that is a subject to prevailing weather conditions can introduce rapid changes in the system operating conditions, resulting in that planning for stable and secure operation can no longer be made few hours ahead. The fluctuating power production introduces a need for short-horizon supervision and fast planning and coordination of control actions that ensure system security in real-time.

In this talk, an overview of the current research activates and projects at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU), that focus on the development of real-time assessment and control methods that contribute to a secure and stable operation of a future fluctuating sustainable power system. A new real-time stability assessment method, capable of assessing stability of large systems in the millisecond range, will be presented and the method's capability of giving an early warning for the occurrence of the 2003 blackout in Denmark and Sweden will as well be demonstrated.

Dr. Hjortur J³hannsson received the M.Sc. and the PhD degree in Electrical Engineering from Technical University of Denmark (DTU), in 2007 and 2011 respectively. From 2011 to 2014, he was an Assist. Prof. at the Center of Electric Power and Energy (CEE) at DTU. From 2014 he has been serving as a Senior Scientific Consultant at CEE, with the main responsibility of leading a large research projects, supervising PhD students and teaching graduate students about power system stability and control.

Dr. J³hannsson's professional interests are within research and development of methods that enable power system stability and security assessment in real-time and of methods for automatically determining control actions that regain system security when an insecure operation has been detected. This includes a work on theoretical derivation of power system stability limits and development of effective algorithms for wide-area assessment and control of power systems. Special focus is on the development of methods that can cope with assessment of systems where a high share of the power production is based on fluctuating renewable energy sources.