The team first considered how to reduce how often the electric grid power flow had to be simulated over time. (Photo courtesy of Sandia National Laboratories) Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.
Sandia National Laboratories engineers Robert Broderick, left, and Matthew Reno, right, in collaboration with Jeremiah Deboever, center, from Georgia Tech, present their research on quantization methods to speed up quasi-static time series analysis at an Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers meeting.
The software can take a simulation that used to take 36 hours and complete it in less than five minutes on a standard desktop computer. “For example, if each method makes the analysis 10 times faster, when we combine two methods, it could be 100 times faster.”Īn analysis now runs 1,000 times faster than two years ago, Reno said. “The project tackled four main areas to make time series analysis faster - with the idea that each of the four areas was developed independently - and then they were combined,” Reno said. In a three-year project funded by DOE’s Solar Energy Technologies Office as part of the Grid Modernization Lab Consortium, Sandia, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Georgia Tech University, the Electric Power Research Institute and CYME International, the largest software vendor for utility companies, took a four-part approach to speeding up time-series analyses to learn more accurately how use of solar energy affects the grid. This can lead to increased connection costs or homeowners living in parts of the city having unnecessarily low limits for adding solar panels, especially in sunny states.” “However, doing a snapshot of one instance in time is conservative because of the uncertainty about impacts that happen at various times on solar panels, such as the weather. “When installing new solar panels on the grid, utility companies will analyze how a new system interacts with the grid, typically by doing a snapshot, power-flow simulation to determine if the impacts will be OK or not,” said Sandia engineer Matthew Reno. The new simulations are more detailed than those used by utility companies, and Sandia researchers hope they will result in more solar panel installations.
This type of grid analysis hasn’t been practical outside of research settings, until now, because previous models took days to run a single scenario. Large amounts of solar generation in one section of a city can lead to extreme voltage fluctuations, which can damage household electronics.
Utility companies need the analysis because they must deliver electricity at the standard voltage used to run everything from refrigerators to phone chargers. (Photo by Randy Montoya) Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image. Matthew Reno, a Sandia National Laboratories engineer, helped develop new software that can perform quasi-static time series analysis to show how rooftop solar panels interact with the electrical grid throughout the year.