Two industry trends have led to the rapid growth of distributed power system deployment: the influx of distributed energy resources (DER), such as renewables, on the utility grid and the push towards electrification of systems, such as marine and aircraft power systems. Distributed power systems have layers of control tasks often directed by a supervisory energy management system (EMS), all of which require testing and validation prior to final integration into the utility grid or power system.

This video series explores the concepts of distributed power systems, with a focus on the microgrid and renewables. A case study of a microgrid with a peak shaving/islanding EMS is used to explore workflows on design, testing, and validation. Examples of topics include:

• Simulating grid-connected/islanded microgrids with renewable DERs and utility-scale energy storage systems
• Designing and validating EMS supervisory logic for all operating conditions and testing grid codes and standards such as IEEE 1547
• Leveraging controller hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) to test industrial EMS hardware with an emulated version of the microgrid prior to final integration