IEEE Power Electronics Magazine - March 2016 - 33

In essence, based on their understanding of the rapidly
changing landscape of power processing and conversion
from the grid to the consumer, the participants identified
fundamental issues for pushing the application boundaries
by the year 2025 and beyond.
The workshops were organized from 4 to 6 September
by PELS under the chairmanship of Prof. Frede Blaabjerg
of Aalborg University, Denmark and cochairs Prof. Ferreira and Prof. Daan Van Wyk of Rand Afrikaans University,
South Africa. While Prof. Dushan Boroyevich of Virginia
Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech)
was the long-range planning chair, Prof. Paolo Mattavelli
of the University of Padova, Italy, acted as the local advisor
and organizer for the conference.
On day 1 (4 September 2015), there were three technical
sessions, "Power System Infrastructure," "Converter Networks/Systems," and "Transportation Electrification."

Power System Infrastructure
The "Power System Infrastructure" session, chaired by Prof.
Johan Enslin of the University of North Carolina, Charlotte,
featured five papers. The paper "Challenges for Developing
the Integrated Grid" kicked off the session. Since the paper's
author, Mark McGranaghan, Electric Power Research Institute's (EPRI's) vice president, was not at the workshop,
Prof. Enslin presented it.
With the rapid rise of distributed energy resources,
EPRI has been studying the transformation of the electric
grid. In other words, EPRI has been investigating ways to
integrate these emerging resources into the conventional
grid so that customers can tap the benefits of both the central power system and distributed resources in the most
cost effective way. EPRI's paper proposed an integrated
grid as a power system that is highly flexible, resilient, and
connected, with the ability to optimize energy resources
(Figure 1). In addition, the integrated grid would allow lo-

cal energy optimization to become part of the global energy optimization.
The presentation indicated that EPRI started working
on this concept in February 2014 (phase 1). A benefit/cost
assessment of an integrated grid was conducted in January 2015 (phase 2). The project is now in phase 3 of this
development, with ongoing demonstrations of pilot projects. There has been extensive industry coordination in all
three phases. While addressing the integration issues, the
study has also been focusing on how much to integrate with
hosting capacity that ensures voltage control and thermal
limits. Speaking of capacity, the study suggests that, in the
future, capacity and ancillary services will become more
important with an integrated grid.
The paper identified a few game changers for the integrated grid. They include distributed solar, energy storage
and associated power electronics, distributed intelligence,
and model-based management, including new models for
power electronics controls. To realize this vision, there are
many challenges to confront. According to McGranaghan's
paper, key among them are research collaboration and coordination, cross-cutting approaches, standards, and new
approaches to education and training.
Demonstrating the critical role of power electronics at
the utility grid, Prof. Deepak Divan of the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, and the founder and chief scientist of Varentec, presented the second paper, "Grid-Edge
Control-Distributed Control of Power Systems." Calling
grid-edge control a new paradigm for distributed control of
power systems, Prof. Divan argued that the conventional
centralized volt-var control is complex and slow, with a
limited number of operations and challenging implementation of fault detection, isolation, and load restoration.
Moreover, there is no secondary voltage control, and photovoltaic (PV) integration is difficult, while conservation
voltage reduction performance is poor. Prof. Divan's paper

kW
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FIG 1 EPRI's vision of an integrated grid. (Figure courtesy of EPRI.)

March 2016

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Power Electronics Magazine - March 2016