Powernet

Stanford Team: Gustavo Cezar, Thomas Navidi, Elizabeth Buechler, Aaron Goldin, Yuting Ji (alumni), June Flora, Ram Rajagopal, and Abbas El Gamal

Powernet is a project funded by the DOE Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-e) as part of the Network Optimized Distributed Energy Systems (NODES) program. Powernet is an open-source and open architecture platform for scalable and secure coordination of consumer flexible load and DERs. It uses a layered architecture that enables real-time coordination of centralized resources with millions of DERs by integrating embedded sensing and computing, power electronics, and networking with cloud computing.

The Powernet project included the development of the following components:

• Control architectures for coordinating DERs across a network to provide grid services
• Algorithms for modeling, forecasting, and controlling residential loads at the home level
• "Smart Dim Fuse" power electronics for sub-circuit voltage modulation and load sensing
• An energy management system for coordinating resources on commercial dairy farms, which was tested in a deployment project
• A smart home lab space at Stanford for validating DER and load control strategies

Publications

Coordination Algorithms:

• Navidi, Thomas, Abbas El Gamal, and Ram Rajagopal. "Coordinating distributed energy resources for reliability can significantly reduce future distribution grid upgrades and peak load." Joule (2023).
• Navidi, Thomas, Abbas El Gamal, and Ram Rajagopal. "A two-layer decentralized control architecture for der coordination." 2018 IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC). IEEE, 2018.
• Navidi, Thomas, Abbas El Gamal, and Ram Rajagopal. "Co-optimizing Energy, Grid Services and Voltage Support in Networks with Distributed Storage." 2019 IEEE Power & Energy Society General Meeting (PESGM). IEEE, 2019.
• Navidi, Thomas, Chloe Leblanc, Abbas El Gamal, and Ram Rajagopal. "DER Information Unaware Coordination via Day-ahead Dynamic Power Bounds." 2020 IEEE International Conference on Communications, Control, and Computing Technologies for Smart Grids (SmartGridComm). IEEE, 2020.
• Anderson, Kyle, Ram Rajagopal, and Abbas El Gamal. "Coordination of distributed energy storage under spatial and temporal data asymmetry." IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid 10.2 (2017): 1184-1194.
• Radovanović, Ana, et al. "Powernet for distributed energy resource networks." 2016 IEEE Power and Energy Society General Meeting (PESGM). IEEE, 2016.

Farm Energy Management

• Rajagopal, Ram, Gustavo Cezar, Thomas Navidi, Elizabeth Buechler, and Abbas El Gamal. "Behind-the-meter resource management system." U.S. Patent Application No. 17/703,621.
• Presentation at the 2020 MIT A+B Applied Energy Symposium (Best Paper Award)

Smart Dim Fuse Power Electronics

• Goldin, Aaron Sargent, et al. "Smart dim fuse: electrical load flexibility controller using sub-circuit voltage modulation and load sensing." U.S. Patent No. 11,296,507. 5 Apr. 2022.
• Goldin, Aaron, Ram Rajagopal, Claudio Rivetta, and Juan M. Rivas Davila. "The “Smart Dim Fuse”: A new approach to load control as a distributed energy resource." 2017 IEEE 18th Workshop on Control and Modeling for Power Electronics (COMPEL). IEEE, 2017.

Load Modeling and Forecasting

• Ji, Yuting, Elizabeth Buechler, and Ram Rajagopal. "Data-driven load modeling and forecasting of residential appliances." IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid 11.3 (2019): 2652-2661.
• Goldin, Aaron, Elizabeth Buechler, Ram Rajagopal, and Juan Rivas-Davila. "Time and voltage domain load models for appliance-level grid edge simulation and control." Electric Power Systems Research 190 (2021): 106750.
• Ji, Yuting, and Ram Rajagopal. "Demand and flexibility of residential appliances: An empirical analysis." 2017 IEEE Global Conference on Signal and Information Processing (GlobalSIP). IEEE, 2017.

Powernet Partners

Funding Agency