Self-Healing Adaptive Resilient Power Systems

SHePS are essential for ensuring resilience in critical infrastructure, such as defense, emergency response, and communications, especially during severe natural or man-made disruptions to the power grid. Current SHePS concepts often depend on high-speed communication networks, which can be costly, cyber-vulnerable, and unreliable during crises. Previous research at Sandia has shown that significant improvements in power system performance can be achieved without relying on these high-speed communications.

The assessment of power-system reliability typically excludes Major Event Days (MEDs), which are crucial periods when the most severe impacts on society occur. Enhancing power system resilience during these MEDs is vital, and SHePS can provide this resilience through automated self-organization. However, existing concepts often still rely on impractical communication networks.

This project will tackle the following SHAZAM-identified challenges:

  1. enabling system components to function without explicit knowledge of isolation switch statuses
  2. locating faults without causing widespread outages
  3. accommodating both inverter-based and rotating generation
  4. isolating faults to mitigate wildfire risks; and
  5. ensuring that grid-following assets can operate autonomously without causing instability.

The SHARPS initiative aims to build upon the successes of previous work to create affordable SHePS that can deliver threat-agnostic resilience during MEDs without the need for high-speed, real-time communications. A key objective of the SHARPS project is to advance the technology readiness level (TRL) of SHAZAM from approximately TRL 3 to TRL 7. The SHARPS team will collaborate closely with industrial partners to create a comprehensive demonstration plan for SHARPS + SHAZAM at the IDEAL Center at New Mexico State University. This initiative aims to showcase the practical applications of SHePS in enhancing grid resilience, ultimately contributing to a more robust and reliable power infrastructure capable of withstanding diverse threats.