Elia Group and Energinet (Grid operators in Germany, Denmark and Belgium) selected Prof. Luigi Vanfretti's team's project idea responding to one of their research questions as specified in their research challenge. They are the only US-based team selected, with other projects being from world-top universities and research centers, like ETH Zurich.
Per Elia Group:
"At Elia Group – in collaboration with Energinet – we’re excited to drive agile, dynamic cooperation between TSOs and leading research institutes. The Open Research Challenge bridges the gap between science and practice, aiming for tangible results that can be applied in our control rooms within one year.
Elia Group and Energinet have the goal to accelerate the speed from R&D to (system) operations. Therefore, we’re excited to drive agile & dynamic cooperation between TSOs and leading research institutes. The Open Research Challenge bridges the gap between science and practice, aiming for tangible results that can be applied in our control rooms within one year.
The challenge was initiated through our involvement in the Global Power System Transformation Consortium, reinforcing our commitment to global collaboration."
Together with his PhD student Hao Chang, Prof.Vanfretti is helping them address one important problem: given a manufacturer black-box model of a power system component, can we provide a simplified "white box" model in hashtagModelica that can run faster and with "good enough" accuracy in a power system simulation tool?
With this project, they seek to address one of the many challenges, providing grid operators with modern approaches to develop detailed dynamic models without the need of "black-box" proprietary models, and we will try to contribute to address this gap through the use of open access standards for simulation, namely hashtagModelica and the hashtagFMI, while attempting to gain speed thanks to the interface available in the tool used for simulations (hashtagPowerFactory) in Energinet.