Towards a Flexible and Resilient Power Grid with Distributed Energy Resources

Distributed energy resources (DERs) are growing rapidly due to their potential to avoid massive infrastructure transform, state incentivized policies, climate change targets, and customer-centric investment and services. However, this influx of the DERs has changed the power paradigm, and is disrupting the traditional markets and operation models of the power grids. The work reported in this thesis aims to harness flexibility and resilience for the power grid, providing solutions to the challenges involved in the management of the increasing DERs. To achieve these aims, this thesis proposes end-to-end solutions to plan, coordinate, model, monitor, forecast, and ultimately control and dispatch these DERs, optimally across all internal and external systems and stakeholders in the market and power grid operation models while addressing the uncertainties of the DERs, loads and the electricity price. The thesis provides comprehensive investigations of the potential application and deployment of microgrids (MGs), and virtual power plants (VPPs). Here, the aggregation concept serves as a vehicle for the implementation of coordinated and optimized control decisions employing interconnected and interoperable solutions. The developed strategies and frameworks are implemented through the service-oriented design and control scheme of the MGs, and VPPs to determine the economic and technically feasible solutions in the energy market and power grid operations.