GMLC OpenFMB for Resiliency

As customers interconnect a growing number of distributed energy resources (DERs) to the grid, utilities are investigating solutions to incorporating these DERs into their operations.   A Grid Modernization Laboratory Consortium (GMLC) project funded by DOE and led by PNNL recently demonstrated how a utility operational power system can safely incorporate DERs into its operations.  The project considered a control system integrated with the Open Field Message Bus (OpenFMB) architecture to increase system flexibility and resiliency.   This GMLC project recently concluded yielding interesting results. This document summarizes the scope and objectives of the project and summarizes the findings which include:

• Coordination of distributed assets, using existing commercially off-the-shelf relays and open-source software, can produce a flexible system
• Using distributed control, via OpenFMB, it is possible to coordinate the operation of centralized and distributed systems
• Self-healing control can improve reliability of the system
• Additional customer loads can be restored by non-utility owned DERs using transactive energy based reactive power control