PNNL

Abstract

With the rapid proliferation of distributed energy resources and advancement in sensing and control, deploying advanced apps has become crucial for power distribution operations to achieve resilience, economic, decarbonization, and other system mandates. However, conflicts can arise when multiple applications attempt to control the same devices, potentially leading to oscillatory system behavior and sub-optimal performance. This paper aims to characterize conflicts and measure the resulting system performance through relevant metrics when applying various deconfliction solution techniques. First, we use a conflict matrix that comprehensively overviews the conflicts between different applications. Next, we propose a novel metric to quantify the severity of conflicts, facilitating their prioritization and resolution. Finally, we quantify application success and system volatility after different techniques are used to resolve application conflict. Three competing applications, namely resilience, decarbonization, and conservation voltage reduction, are considered to showcase the potential conflicts. Two deconfliction solution techniques, exclusivity and compromise, are implemented, and their impacts on the app's performance are evaluated. A modified IEEE 123-bus model is used as the test system to demonstrate the proposed assessments. Applying the derived conflict metric and relevant volatility metrics provides a quantitative assessment of the system's performance and the impact of conflicting setpoints.