Future Power Grids

Grid Structure and Control

The trends towards high penetration of fluctuating renewable energy sources, driven by a growing political, social and economic attention to the energy landscape and environmental aspects in different countries pose technical and economic challenges for transmission and distribution network operators as well as utilities.

The unpredictable generation, the bidirectional power flow caused by the increased number of prosumers require the development of new and innovative solutions in which the generation, conversion and storage of electrical energy are optimally controlled using advanced strategies.

In this context, the development of advanced control algorithms and optimization solutions is crucial for enabling safe, reliable and efficient grid operation providing high flexibility and at the same time sustainable and economic operation.

At the German Corporate Research Center we support this investigating and enhancing the existing grid planning tools to enable and assess new technologies and grid structures. We develop advanced control and optimization solutions for transmission and distribution grids as well as for multi energy virtual power plants to add new functionalities to the existing network and energy management tools.

Furthermore, we strive to enable and achieve an efficient prototyping validation of our control and optimization solutions coupling commercially available simulation environments with suitably developed software solutions and existing products working on cosimulation software in the loop platforms.

Condition monitoring and diagnostics

The demand for condition monitoring and diagnostics (CMD) of electrical devices in the future power grid is constantly increasing as operators are aiming for extension of the lifetime of their installed base. Additional reasons are the enhanced availability and increased operational safety of the equipment.

Strong enablers of CMD for modern intelligent equipment are given by advances in the sensor area, in particular driven by low-cost sensors from mass market applications, availability of information and communication technologies and vast data processing capabilities.

ABB Corporate research is supporting the business by developing new advanced and innovative technological solutions for condition monitoring and diagnostics covering all important development aspects: Starting with understanding and simulating the underlying physical origins of equipment failure as well as aging, suitable sensing concepts get developed. As next step these general sensing concepts get adopted to meet the business requirements on cost, robustness and performance.

With the final application in mind a fully functional technology demonstrator of the sensing system gets developed including packaging, sensor installation, electronics, means for communication and signal processing. This device is typically tested under close to realistic conditions and could also be used for realization of an early pilot demonstrator at an end customer site.  

Important physical parameters for CMD of electrical devices are temperature, partial discharge and vibration. Advanced analysis of such data for extraction of actionable information often requires input from further sensors such as current and voltage sensors. These sensor fusion approaches combined with novel developments in the field of artificial intelligence result in a sensor solution fulfilling the customer’s needs. 

Protection devices for futrure power grids

Transmission grids and distribution grids undergo significant change challenged by the increasing shares of converter-based variable renewable energy sources. The interruptive penetration of e.g. wind and solar energy forces the transmission system operators to look for fast solutions and new middle- and long-term strategies.

A tremendous rise of emergency interventions to stabilize the grid is observed even today. Time-varying demand of energy and even more the highly stochastic appearing characteristics of energy production on the basis of wind and solar change the conditions in future grids.

Qualitative trends like more frequent and synchronous switching due to compensation systems, faster and reliable switching, adaptive circuit breaker contact travel curve shaping and recognition are faced in ABB Corporate Research in order to bring protection equipment and circuit breakers to the next level of controllability and robustness.

Model driven monitoring and service solutions will pave the way to new kinds of serviceability and predictive maintenance.

Electromagnetic actuation of circuit breakers is in particular suitable to meet the requirements of the future power grid concerning controlled, synchronized and monitored switching. The development of respective drives requires the understanding of phenomena stemming from the mechanics, electrics and magnetics domain.

This is facilitated by means of state of the art modeling and simulation. Here, the consideration of the mutual influences between the domains is essential for high-fidelity, reliable and efficient modelling. Future circuit breaker drives aim to have fewer parts, simple mechanical sequences, an extremely high reliability and quality standard and an extremely long life.