Abstract
Creating and maintaining a black-start strategy is very important for utilities. A successful strategy starts with identifying feasible power sources in feasible cranking paths. Having more such sources available at your disposal increases the flexibility, effectiveness and reliability of the strategy. Supercapacitor Energy Storage System (SESS) with its fast response time is ideally suited to provide cost competitive Watt-Hz support during the black-start sequence so that some of the existing DER plants can be made to be feasible candidates. Idaho National Lab in partnership with Maxwell Technologies initiated a DoE project to evaluate this technology. Being the first of its kind application, real-time PHIL testing was considered an essential step to validate the strategy to de-risk the investment in a field pilot. This presentation discusses the PHIL test setup with the SESS power hardware interfaced with a candidate DER plant modeled in RTDS™. The test demonstrates the effectiveness of the strategy and gives confidence to propose the field pilot. Supercapacitors are supplied by Maxwell Technologies. The converter and controls are supplied by EPC Power.
Aung Thant, Maxwell Technologies; Om Nayak, Nayak Corporation; Mayank Panwar, Idaho National Laboratory