TRU 3 : Management of electrical systems with high penetration of renewable energies

The desire for a strong integration of renewable energies, with a view to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, is reflected in the need to develop new solutions for the production of electrical energy, namely micro-grids. The developments associated with these micro-grids are directly related to most national and international actions and target the fields of stationary energy production and embedded applications. By nature, micro-grids represent a decentralised mode of energy production, which entails a paradigm shift in the development and management of tomorrow's electricity network, from a radial network, from producers to distant consumers, to a meshed network, composed of a multitude of interconnected micro-grids.

It turns out that this issue is extremely broad and complex. It includes considerations ranging from the problems of stability and reliability of micro-grids, partly linked to the high intermittency of renewable resources, to energy management and possible modes of governance of these decentralised networks, which have yet to be invented.

We therefore propose to approach this theme through two distinct issues, namely that of energy management and the resilience of micro-grids, which will consider the problems of piloting and controlling micro-grids, in order to ensure their reliability in particular, and that of the management of complex heterogeneous electrical systems, which will mainly seek to propose methodological approaches to the problems of dimensioning and optimal management.
 

• Lock 1 : Energy control and resilience of micro-grids [TRU 2 et 3]
  • The aim is to control micro-grids for a better integration of RE, while ensuring a quality electrical energy. The operation of the micro-grid must be ensured, even in degraded mode, and the decentralised nature of the production requires the implementation of advanced hierarchical control algorithms. Similarly, the multiplication of sources and loads can be a source of instability, hence the need to study the possible origins of instability in the micro-grid and thus correct them. To address these issues, four main actions will be carried out by the members of teams 2 and 3. They will be based on both theoretical (modeling, simulation) and experimental (test benches, HIL, etc.) approaches.

 

• Lock 2 : Management of complex heterogeneous electrical systems
  • Today, the step of technico-economic analysis of electrical engineering problems has been widely taken and is commonly recognised as an efficient and relevant means for the analysis and optimisation of systems, both in their dimensioning phase and in their control and energy management. The tendency is then to seek to integrate new dimensions to these problems. In the context of networks and micro-grids, when one wishes to tackle the problem of energy management on the scale of a district, a city or even a metropolis, it is necessary to resort to multi-energy approaches, which integrate in a coupled and interdependent manner the thermal, electrical and hydrogen vectors. The difficulty lies in the need to take into account these inter-domain couplings, which may involve very different temporal dynamics. This problem is also found in the existing couplings between control, dimensioning and energy management, which it is not inappropriate to treat separately when looking for optimised solutions. In addition to these difficulties, there are those of integrating governance models, which are currently in their infancy, but which are nevertheless of primary importance with regard to the technical and economic dimensioning of solutions, but also in the definition of optimised management scenarios. In the context of MRE (Marine Renewable Energy), which is both a specificity and an opportunity for the Pays de Loire's ecosystem, it appears that the current deployment of offshore MRE parks is partly hindered by certain obstacles concerning the difficulty of proposing optimised positioning and connection architectures, capable of integrating the reliability and robustness dimension. Thus, to address these issues of electrical system management, a number of actions are envisaged.