Leveraging National Laboratory Assets to Address Stability Challenges due to Declining Grid Inertia Using Geographically Distributed Electrical–Thermal Co-Emulation

Due to increased penetration of low-inertia resources into the electric grid, challenges are increasing for maintaining wide-area system stability. Grid stability assessment requires a faithful representation of the multiple-physics interaction at the system level, and timescales of interaction varying in orders of magnitude, from microseconds to seconds to several minutes. Along with the simulation-based techniques, hardware-in-the-loop (HIL), controller HIL, and power HIL techniques have been developed to better understand the emergent behavior of the system with emerging technologies. US National Laboratories have played a vital role in research and development to understand the behavior of individual technologies and devices integrated to the electric grid. Each national laboratory forwards a technological and strategic initiative tied core and enabling capabilities. Due to strategic, efficiency, and economic reasons, not all the labs have assets to conduct research on all technologies concomitantly, so it becomes crucial to integrate the labs across geographies to understand the interplay of different technologies together at the system level. This approach avoids duplication of the assets at different lab facilities and helps understand the integrated system behavior of various technologies representative of actual grid conditions by connecting multiple national labs. This paper talks about techniques of connecting three national laboratories to enable co-emulation of electrical–mechanical–thermal characteristics of devices and systems. Such an approach can be used to understand the dynamic and transient interaction of multi-physics in a system level, at-scale emulation using real-time simulation tools and techniques.