CURENT Research
CURENT's research focuses on the following thrusts:
CURENT envisions a nation-wide transmission grid that is fully controlled for better performance and accommodation of renewable resources. To enable the wide-area control in a transmission grid with high penetration of renewable energy sources, CURENT is active in developing transmission system architectures as well as the related control and protection schemes.
CURENT foresees renewable systems playing a much more active role in frequency and voltage regulation in grids of the future. To ensure that the electric system of the future can fully utilize these resources, CURENT is developing converter based control systems that can provide advanced voltage and frequency regulation capability.
Wide-spread deployment of phasor measurement units in power systems is expected to facilitate their utilization for monitoring of both the steady-state and dynamic state of the system. In anticipation of this development, CURENT is investigating robust static and dynamic estimation methods and their implementation for large scale systems. An important consideration in using these devices for monitoring and subsequent control decisions is the security of data and information received in real-time. CURENT is developing customized solutions to address these security issues.
The FNET/GridEye system is a unique wide area grid monitoring network deployed and operated by the University of Tennessee and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. It provides independent observation of the entire electrical grid’s dynamic performance continuously and in real time.
Two testbeds are being developed: (1) Large-scale System Testbed (LTB) and (2) Hardware Testbed (HTB). The functions of both these testbeds are two-fold: to demonstrate and test technologies developed in thrust research and to drive this research through system level requirements and specifications.
