NJIT's Simulated Power Grid Helps Engineers Plan for Car Chargers and Wind Farms

Increases in electric car sales and offshore wind farm construction are poised to both tax and bolster the American power transmission grid, so researchers at New Jersey Institute of Technology are building a grid simulator to help industry predict the effects and plan accordingly.

The NJIT team is led by electrical engineering professors Marcos Netto and Philip Pong, who jointly received $500,000 of a $1.5M National Science Foundation grant. They will study system dynamics and sensors, respectively. The remaining funds will be shared among collaborators from Harvard University (control and reinforcement learning), Princeton University (power electronics), Purdue University (applied mathematics and machine learning) and the University of Connecticut (power system state estimation). All six researchers are co-principal investigators.

“We typically divide the power grids out there into transmission and distribution. The poles on the streets are part of the distribution grid. The very big towers that you see along the highways when you are traveling are part of the transmission grid. The voltage levels on transmission lines are very high, for example, 500,000 volts, and they carry large blocks of electric energy from one part of the country to another,” Netto explained.

“The focus of this project is on the transmission. Renewable energy resources, particularly offshore wind, will connect to the transmission grids. A tremendous amount of planned offshore wind is supposed to tap into the transmission grid here in New Jersey and pretty much the whole Eastern seaboard,” he stated. “And there is another trend toward electric vehicles. There are a couple of studies now saying, suppose you are on a very busy highway with many cars charging at the same time. That facility will exceed the limits of the distribution level, so we have to connect to the transmission.”

However, “We cannot have a power system in the lab. So we operate similarly to the aircraft business, for example. If they design a new aircraft, they have to have models and simulators to test it before they actually build it. Here we are developing software models for these new parts — for the offshore wind, and for the EV fast charging sites — and connecting those models with models that we already know for the transmission grid that’s out there.”

In the simulated power grid, Netto and Pong will look at how the voltages and frequencies change when wind turbines send more power into the grid and when car chargers take more power from it. They will also examine external changes such as weather patterns, and ultimately they’ll develop new mathematical models that will be used by utility companies and their suppliers.

Industrial Partners Are a Key to Project Success

Netto said the various researchers are also working with the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory, a Canadian simulation company called OPAL-RT, local utility provider PSEG and equipment developer Siemens. The latter is donating a DC fast car charger, which will be installed in a parking lot adjacent to NJIT Electrical and Computer Engineering Center. It will provide real-world data. “We certainly have to have some control of the people using it. But it’ll be open to some extent for people in the NJIT community to use it,” he added.

Siemens’ Chris King, senior vice president of eMobility strategic partnerships, said the company is pleased to help NJIT with this particular research because it holds promise for facilitating electric vehicle charging deployment and ultimately promoting further adoption. “Siemens believes the project has a lot of value in terms of how to reduce EV charging impacts on the grid,” King said. “We hope to learn more about how to mitigate those impacts and how to deploy charging infrastructure faster. Connecting directly to the transmission grid provides significant power availability and sidesteps the problem of distribution grid constraints.”

There are about 100,000 chargers currently running in the U.S., all connected to the distribution grid, King said. But the U.S. government is funding a $5 billion project, called National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure, aiming to install car chargers every 50 miles on interstate highways — and this could be through the transmission grid. “The idea is to eliminate range anxiety. So people know I'm going to find a place within 50 miles. These are fast chargers that are being put on the highway, meaning you fill up in 10 or 15 minutes.”