Collaborative Research: CPS: Medium: Enabling DER Integration via Redesign of Information Flows

This NSF CPS project aims to redesign the information structure utilized by system operators in today's electricity markets to accommodate technological advances in energy generation and consumption. The project will bring transformative change to power systems by incentivizing and facilitating the integration of non-conventional energy resources via a principled design of bidding, aggregation, and market mechanisms.

Such integration will provide operators with the necessary flexibility to operate a network with high levels of renewable penetration. This will be achieved by a comprehensive bottom-down approach that will first identify the intrinsic cost of utilizing novel renewable resources and accommodate the operational ecosystem accordingly. The intellectual merits of the project include novel theories and algorithms for operating a vast number of distributed resources and testbed implementations of markets and controls.

The project's broader impacts include K-12 and undergraduate programs, including in-class and extra-curricular STEM activities through, e.g., Hopkins in-class and extra-curricular STEM activities, and the Caltech WAVE summer research program.

Introducing distributed energy resources (DERs) at a large scale requires rethinking power grid operations to account for increased uncertainty and new operational constraints. The proposed research undertakes this task by overhauling the information structure that markets and grid controls utilize. We seek to characterize and shape how information is exchanged and used to manage the grid to improve efficiency, stability, and incentive alignment.

The research is organized into three thrusts. Thrust 1 emphasizes the role of information in coordination. It seeks to characterize DER costs and constraints, designing bidding strategies tailored to convey information about the atypical characteristics of DER costs.

Thrust 2 aims to develop aggregation strategies that efficiently manage resources by accounting for their cost and constraints, integrating DERs via an aggregate bid that protects sensitive user information and is robust to market manipulation. Finally, Thrust 3 characterizes the overall impact of DERs on operations. We will examine how user incentives that span across markets implicitly couple market outcomes and develop design mechanisms to mitigate inter-market price manipulation.

We will also design pricing schemes that provide efficient DER allocation while preserving real-time operational constraints such as frequency regulation.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.