Technology Licensing View

Technology Opportunity

Florida International University (FIU) is seeking a business partner to develop and commercialize a Distributed Renewable Energy Grid Controller. While customer demand at a power grid distribution network remains relatively predictable during the course of a day, the quick morning ramp ups and late afternoon ramp downs in grid connected Renewable Energy Source (RES) power plants without the support of secondary sources of generation to maintain the supply that meets the foreseen demand in a real-time manner pose a severe threat to the stability of the grid and the availability of power to customers. Existing technologies that deal with problems of such magnitude are based on unreliable weather prediction and ineffective modeling, making the overall grid performance unreliable and inefficient. There is a need for a solution that synergistically integrates novel computational tools for smart RES generation forecasting and wide-area aggregation, optimization for providing dynamic RES hosting capacity, intelligent device synchronization, and on demand ability to dispatch, complemented by state-of-the-art situationally aware visualization capable of providing in-depth operational visibility for real-time monitoring of the grid with complete accessibility to the entire grid.

FIU researchers have developed a technology for effectively integrating large-scale distributed RESs across the smart grid and sustaining their benefits, through the creation of an adaptive holistic controller that comprises predictive and prescriptive computation models to address and mitigate the three pressing concerns facing the high-penetration scenarios of the RESs into the grid: (1) Optimization models to tackle the intermittencies in the generation of RESs at sub-second speeds in order to leverage maximum performance and cost benefits from over 80% of the existing RESs that are currently utilized well under their maximum potential, (2) Delivering operational visibility for the analysts and operators at the utilities’ Command and Control Centers down to the customer-level, and (3) Providing intelligent synchronization and coordination among smart power electronics such as smart inverters in the field, which would ensure autonomous restoration of failures at customer-levels without human intervention, thus reinforcing the self-healing principle of the smart grid.

Applications

• Future smart grid as a synergistic integration of its various components with tools for forecasting and intelligent load sharing among a diverse group of distributed RESs.
• Understand, predict and mitigate the system instabilities and fluctuations triggered by photovoltaic intermittencies. This controller can be used in the planning process at the command and control centers for electric utilities.

Advantages

Assists in effectively integrating, bringing control visibility and managing small-to-large RES across the smart grid.