With increasing opposition to building new transmission lines, transfer of bulk energy is going to be a major challenge in the UK and in many parts of Europe. Examples include the transmission link from the north of the UK to the load centres in the south and the corridor importing hydro power from north of Norway to the load centres near Oslo. It is therefore, absolutely critical that the existing power transmission assets are fully utilised by loading them much closer to their capacity. To ensure secure operation under such heavy loading, the dynamic performance of the system needs to be improved through appropriate control of voltage and power flow using the flexible ac transmission systems (FACTS) devices. It is often difficult to obtain accurate information about all the components (e.g. loads) of a power system which poses fundamental limitation on conventional model based control design. In the above context, this project aims at designing and validating a self-tuning control scheme for FACTS devices that rely solely on the measured signals and thereby, obviate the need for accurate system information. Such controllers are designed independent of the system operating condition and therefore, need no retuning with changes in system configuration. Use of more than one feedback signals from strategic locations, available though wide-area measurement systems (WAMS), can potentially improve the effectiveness of the FACTS controller. Hence, the control design needs to be formulated in a multi-variable framework. The performance of the controller would be validated in real-time through hardware-in-loop (HIL) simulation employing a test bench, emulating the behaviour of large power systems, and a commercial control simulator. The proposed project essentially integrates FACTS with WAMS and could potentially provide the developers and user of both these technologies a new edge.

Energy production and distribution is undergoing radical change driven by a "Green" agenda pushing for increased energy conservation, greater emphasis on renewable energy sources and more sophisticated demand side business models. The UK currently has 12% of its energy requirements met by wind farms. This percentage is set to grow as wind generated electricity is imported from neighbouring countries. For example Ireland (where already 50% of domestic energy requirements are met by wind farms) will become a net exporter of wind generated electricity in the near future. The significance of this market change cannot be underestimated and will lead to broad infrastructural change. Wind generated electricity is bursty in nature, largely unpredictable and seldom occurs when consumer demand is greatest. This is true of most renewable energy sources. Wind farms are typically sited in remote areas of low population density and collectively represent a highly distributed generation source. This is in stark contrast to the traditional grid which can be characterised as a strictly hierarchical, centrally managed network of carbon or nuclear energy fuelled generators which can accurately predict demand side requirements and vary their output accordingly. Grid infrastructure and methods of operation will change radically in order to accommodate new, distributed, renewable energy generation and a growing population of prosumers - retail customers who consume and produce energy in tandem. The technical challenges are manifold and many of the assumptions underpinning traditional grid operations are rapidly dissolving. Energy network operators urgently need new guidance and direction to meet the dual challenges of: 1. Maintaining operational control over new, highly distributed generation facilities embedded in a prosumer driven, highly connected, ICT dependent, grid infrastructure. 2. Implementing sufficient control measures to protect grid operations from Internet borne threats and attacks. Caprica meets these challenges head on and proposes to investigate the phenomena of synchronous islanding via experimentation on the only large scale synchrophasor network available in the UK. Islanding occurs when a geographic portion of the distribution network becomes electrically isolated from the rest of the grid. Reconnecting an island back onto the grid can be very dangerous if the two portions of the network are not properly synchronised. Phase drift is a likely scenario for a self-powered island driven by wind or other renewable generation sources. The QUB EPIC team have been working on this problem and can demonstrate solutions based on a distributed control architecture using synchrophasor measurement devices. The synchrophasors operate over a public telecoms network which immediately leads to cyber vulnerabilities in the grid control system. A cyber-attack which manipulates synchrophasor measurements could cause untold damage to grid infrastructure and consumer equipment on a national scale. To counter this risk the EPIC and CSIT research groups have come together to collaboratively investigate the control and cyber security elements of synchronous islanding. By providing an integrated view of grid status and cyber defences we will demonstrate improved operational decision making, improved grid resilience in the face of cyber attack, and lay the groundwork for a new distributed control architecture for the UK smartgrid.