"Hierarchical Multi-Level Electric Power System Simulation with Smart Photovoltaic Systems using the Functional Mock-up Interface on the Lawrencium Computing Cluster"

  The adoption of distributed photovoltaics (PV) with smart inverters was one of the first large-scale deployment of grid-interactive, customer owned assets. This paper introduces a co-simulation platform for future scenarios of Distributed Energy Resources (DER), in the context of large-scale deployment, to assess the local and global impact on the electric power grid. The co-simulation platform utilizes the Functional Mock-up Interface (FMI) industry standard to couple 80,851 individual simulators. For this purpose a Modelica package named SCooDER was developed, which includes models for various DERs. The simulation was conducted at the Lawrencium high performance computing cluster. It included a hierarchical structure of multi-level electricity grids (ie, transmission, medium-voltage distribution, and low-voltage distribution), and PV with smart inverters and time-varying load profiles at 80,000 load buses, in representation US state sized electric power grid. With the flexibility of the simulation framework and the agreed-on industry standard for simulation model exchange, future applications can be very broad by coupling multi-domain simulators.