Abstract:
Smart Wires is the world's leading grid-enhancing technology and service provider. The company solves grid issues and advises on the policies, market design, and solutions critical to creating the digital grid. Smart Wires' offering includes its flagship product, SmartValve™—an innovative, digital power flow control technology; state-of-the-art software SUMO; and a range of advisory consulting services and modeling. This is for developing solutions for generation and load connection, power system operation and planning constraints, and technology integration.
SmartValve is Smart Wires’ flagship product. It is an innovative digital power flow control technology that leading system operators worldwide use to quickly solve bottlenecks by creating extra capacity on the existing network. SmartValve is a transformerless, modular Static Synchronous Series Compensator (SSSC) – a series FACTS device – with an integrated fast-acting bypass and flexible deployment and control. The SmartValve essential feature is to inject a voltage in quadrature with the current on the transmission line, increasing or decreasing the line impedance. The device holds several Voltage Source Converters (VSC) in a modular multilevel topology and is connected in series with the line. Each converter injects a DC voltage level to generate a sin wave leading or lagging the line current by 90°, the former known as inductive mode and the latter capacitive mode. This core feature allows our engineers to implement several control algorithms that help transmission system operators control their line power flows based on different line conditions.
Smart Wires has adopted the RTDS® Simulator for the closed-loop testing of its power system products. Our North Carolina Headquarters houses the Hardware-In-The-Loop (HIL) laboratory, and our team of power system engineers, spread across the globe, remotely access the HIL setup to perform high-fidelity power system studies and device testing. At Smart Wires, the HIL setup is used for different purposes, primarily by the Product and Solutions Analytics team, who uses it to test and validate new control algorithms designed for SmartValve, by interacting the HIL setup with a power grid model and testing different conditions to confirm the behavior is as expected. Also, to validate SmartValve models by comparing the device's conduct against the HIL for hundreds of scenarios, assuring that the models align with the product's real firmware. And to perform several power system integration studies for customers to ensure the correct settings and operation of the device on their power grid before the commission of the device.
In this presentation, we will show Smart Wires Hardware-In-The-Loop capabilities and how that translates into a high trust in our technology among the biggest utilities in the world.
Pablo Macedo, Smart Wires