TrustDER
Project team: Sonia Martin, Obi Nnorom, Jr, Oskar Triebe, Evan Laufer, Thomas Navidi, Ram Rajagopal, Abbas El Gamal, Phil Levis, Chin-Woo Tan, VMware (Collaborators)
TrustDER is a project funded by the Department of Energy focused on developing a layered platform system that ensures private, trusted and scalable coordination of distributed energy resources (DERs). The platform will be able to accommodate a variety of resources, such as solar generation, battery systems, and loads and can be used as a standalone or added to existing aggregation systems to enable trust, privacy and resilience. Each layer of the TrustDER platform will be designed to operate independently but will provide information to the layers above it in order to enable the overall coordination architecture.
The key capabilities of each layer include:
- Resource virtualization to take networked collections of untrusted and unreliable DERs and enable a single reliable resource simplifying the management of the DERs.
- Asset authentication (Secure ID) using a blockchain based universal identity management system for grid assets and untrusted behind-the-meter devices.
- Data Reliability achieved by trust and mapping internet of things (IOT) that extends existing network mapping technology to resources connected via ad-hoc and wi-fi networks and determining a trust score for data collected from these resources.
- Private and safe coordination via a distributed two-layer coordination architecture that utilizes edge data, accounting for communication and power network constraints, to coordinate DERs and enable various services such as black start, voltage attenuation, ramping and regulation.
- Scalable distributed privacy for information and energy exchange achieved using cryptographic and statistical privacy frameworks to support virtualization, coordination and edge analytics for DERs.
Key outcomes for the project include the development of the framework and a proof-of-concept functional software implementation for each of these capabilities. Testing and evaluation of the capabilities will be conducted in both simulated and real environments. Multiple facilities will be used for the demonstrations of the TrustDER platform so that a variety of use cases can be evaluated.
The S3L lab recently presented our work on the Battery Abstraction Layer (BAL), a software layer allowing for virtualization of physical batteries, at the BuildSys conference in Boston in November 2022.
Presentation at 2022 Buildsys Conference