Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Energy is tightly linked with societal development in all levels: residential, industrial, transportation, public services, and military infrastructures. Smart energy grid infrastructures with distributed energy resources technologies will ensure cheap, clean, reliable, and high efficient energy systems, while achieving energy conservation. Microgrid concept was introduced to facilitate the integration of renewable energy technologies and operate as grid-connected and islanded modes, which should cover local energy needs. However, there are performance challenges due to the integration of renewable technologies. The concept of Micro Energy Grid (MEG) is introduced to integrate energy thermal, electricity, fuel, with water and transportation, as well as other energy production and supply chains to maximize the overall performance. This includes Combined Heat and Power (CHP) systems with different fuel strategies such as hydrogen, natural gas, with different integration scenarios using fuel cell and gas turbine. Due to the variation of energy resources availability in different local regions/zones, it is important to support energy exchange among interconnected MEGs with local and global performance optimization. This research is aiming at the study of advanced planning, design, control, protection, and operation methods and engineering techniques and practices to achieve high performance interconnected MEGs. In addition, the proposed research will address risks and crisis scenarios by investigating resilient interconnected MEGs to meet local demands / loads, and energy resources, in view of hazards and performance degradation scenarios. Static and dynamic energy semantic networks (ESN) is utilized to model smart energy grid infrastructures. MEG design and control will be studied to meet local energy demands based on internal and external factors and requirements such as safety, integrity, security, quality, environment, and cost. MEG grids will be evaluated and optimized based on design configuration alternatives, control strategies, and operation scenarios to satisfy local and global energy requirements, profiles, resilience, and in normal situations, or during potential disaster situations or security breaches. The design and control of interconnected MEGs will support transportation infrastructures and technologies, which includes rail, trains, transit, vehicles, and other transportation systems. Fault tolerant control strategies and safety and protection layers of interconnected MEGs will be analyzed in view of fault propagation analysis using fault semantic networks (FSN). Integration of ESN and FSN will provide novel systemic approach for resilient interconnected MEGs to meet energy demands and potential disaster scenarios. The proposed research will support requirements from utilities, regulators, technology providers, and end users.