Smart grid state estimation and its applications to grid stabilization

The smart grid is expected to modernize the current electricity grid by commencing a new set of technologies and services that can make the electricity networks more secure, automated, cooperative and sustainable. The smart grid can integrate multiple distributed energy resources (DERs) into the main grid. The need for DERs is expected to become more important in the future smart grid due to the global warming and energy problems. Basically, the smart grid can spread the intelligence of the energy distribution and control system from the central unit to long-distance remote areas, thus enabling accurate state estimation and widearea real-time monitoring of these intermittent energy sources. Reliable state estimation is a key technique to fulfil the control requirement and hence is an enabler for the automation of power grids. Driven by these motivations, this research explores the problem of state estimation and stabilization taking disturbances, cyber attacks and packet losses into consideration for the smart grid. The first contribution of this dissertation is to develop a least square based Kalman filter (KF) algorithm for state estimation, and an optimal feedback control framework for stabilizing the microgrid states. To begin with, the environment-friendly renewable microgrid incorporating multiple DERs is modelled to obtain discrete-time state-space linear equations where sensors are deployed to obtain system state information. The proposed smart grid communication system provides an opportunity to address the state regulation challenge by offering twoway communication links for microgrid information collection, estimation and stabilization. Interestingly, the developed least square based centralised KF algorithm is able to estimate the system states properly even at the beginning of the dynamic process, and the proposed H2 based optimal feedback controller is able to stabilize the microgrid states in a fairly short time. Unfortunately, the smart grid is susceptible to malicious cyber attacks, which can create 3 serious technical, economic, social and control problems in power network operations. In contrast to the traditional cyber attack minimization techniques, this study proposes a recursive systematic convolutional (RSC) code and KF based method in the context of smart grids. The proposed RSC code is used to add redundancy in the microgrid states, and the log maximum a-posterior is used to recover the state information which is affected by random noises and cyber attacks. Once the estimated states are obtained, a semidefinite programming (SDP) based optimal feedback controller is proposed to regulate the system states. Test results show that the proposed approach can accurately mitigate the cyber attacks and properly estimate as well as regulate the system states. The other significant contribution of this dissertation is to develop an adaptive-then-combine distributed dynamic approach for monitoring the grid under lossy communication links between wind turbines and the energy management system. Based on the mean squared error principle, an adaptive approach is proposed to estimate the local state information. The global estimation is designed by combining local estimation results with weighting factors, which are calculated by minimizing the estimation error covariances based on SDP. Afterwards, the convergence analysis indicates that the estimation error is gradually decreased, so the estimated state converges to the actual state. The efficacy of the developed approach is verified using the wind turbine and IEEE 6-bus distribution system. Furthermore, the distribution power sub-systems are usually interconnected to each other, so this research investigates the interconnected optimal filtering problem for distributed dynamic state estimation considering packet losses. The optimal local and neighbouring gains are computed to reach a consensus estimation after exchanging their information with the neighbouring estimators. Then the convergence of the developed algorithm is theoretically proved. Afterwards, a distributed controller is designed based on the SDP approach. Simulation results demonstrate the accuracy of the developed approaches. The penultimate contribution of this dissertation is to develop a distributed state estimation algorithm for interconnected power systems that only needs a consensus step. After modelling the interconnected synchronous generators, the optimal gain is determined to obtain a distributed state estimation. The consensus of the developed approach is proved based on the Lyapunov theory. From the circuit and system point of view, the proposed framework is useful for designing a practical energy management system as it has less computational complexity and provides accurate estimation results.