Implementing a Microgrid Protection and Control System for Avista’s Shared Energy Economy Project

Microgrids provide assurance that electric power is available using reliable, resilient, and secure solutions for maintaining energy delivery with a high level of operating efficiency. This is achieved by integrating state-of-the-art protection, automation, and control schemes along with an energy storage management and load-generation dispatch strategy.

This paper describes the authors’ experiences in planning, designing, developing, testing, and validating a microgrid control system (MCS) implemented for Avista’s Shared Energy Economy project. This project was implemented for a university campus consisting of two buildings supplied by one 13.2 kV utility feed. Each building contains a battery energy storage system (BESS), a photovoltaic (PV) rooftop installation, a building energy management system (BEMS) with optimization capability, as well as existing protection, control, and visualization systems.

The MCS serves as the protection, control, and monitoring layer for all assets within the extent of the microgrid, providing several different modes of successful microgrid operation: highspeed island detection and decoupling, grid-connected optimization mode, islanded mode operation, distributed energy resource (DER) and load management schemes, and automatic synchronization to the grid.

Details of system objective, design challenges, hardware selection, designed functionality, and communication and cybersecurity aspects are discussed, and results from controller hardware-in-the-loop (cHIL) testing are presented.