Collaborative Research: CPS-FR: Designing Network Infrastructures for Reliable Wide-Area Control of Power Systems with Emerging Large Loads

This NSF CPS project aims to construct a massively deployable cyber-physical architecture for wide-area control of electric power systems supplying power to large electronic loads such as AI data centers, crypto mining centers, and high-performance computing centers. The proposed controllers will be designed to be fast, resilient, load-aware, and cost-optimal (FRELCO). The FRELCO grid will consist of a suite of optimal control algorithms for damping oscillations in power flows and voltages, implemented on top of a cost-effective and cyber-secure computing infrastructure connected by high-speed wide-area networks that are dynamically programmable and reconfigurable in tandem with AI workloads. The intellectual merit of this research will be in establishing a timely application of the Wide-Area Measurement System (WAMS) technology through its integration with large load models and inverter-based resources. Open questions on scheduling and financial contracting of data centers, as well as stability-related concerns will be addressed. The results will lead to a significant increase in the Technology Readiness Level of wide-area control, as well as a sustainable architecture for operating the nation's future AI-integrated energy infrastructure. Broader impacts will be include development of new CPS curricula in power systems, controls, and power electronics, joint publications, special sessions in conferences, and collaborations with industry. Experimental demonstrations will be carried out using the SPHERE testbed, which has been recently developed at one of the partner institutions through the NSF Midscale Research Infrastructure program. There is currently a major gap in understanding how massive penetration of large electronic loads will impact the conventional dynamics, stability margins, and control of transmission-level power grids. Most ongoing research activities in this space are devoted to designing hardware architectures for wide-area networks. Very little attention is being paid to how complex control loops, when implemented on top of this network, may perform under the nonlinear and highly erratic power consumption patterns of large loads. Accordingly, our main tasks will be to (1) understand how wide-area oscillations couple with load dynamics, how their control logic interacts with the underlying communication network, and how they should all be co-designed; (2) to investigate how load flexibility can be used for finding stable equilibria that guarantee better stability margins; and (3) to exploit new ideas of resilient network design through software-defined networking (SDN) to ensure cyber-security of wide-area networks where loads could be used as easy access points for malicious intrusions. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.