Energy Technology ·
The ambitious goal of ERC Synergy Grant project SAFEr Grid is to rethink the foundations for a stable, resilient, efficient, and scalable power grid in an era of fully carbon-neutral, highly volatile, and distributed energy generation and consumption. SAFEr Grid’s interdisciplinary team of principal investigators includes Antonello Monti (RWTH ACS), Klaus Wehrle (RWTH COMSYS), Frank Piller (RWTH TIM), and Frede Blaabjerg (AAU Energy). Although electricity supply has been reliable for several decades, today’s power grids face growing challenges due to the increasing electrification of industry, mobility, and thermal processes. The share of volatile, renewable energy sources is rising, and the mechanical inertia that once provided instantaneous energy reserves is gradually being lost. Because power systems are rigidly coupled through a global synchronous frequency—and thus require synchronous power balancing—stability and reliability are increasingly at risk as we move toward carbon neutrality. SAFEr Grid will research a new theory, architecture, and operating principle for our power systems. A fundamental paradigm shift will remove the requirement for synchronism by introducing decoupled, asynchronously operating subgrids capable of balancing energy asynchronously. The mission is to develop a blueprint for a sustainable power grid that is stable, scalable, and incrementally deployable, making full use of the existing infrastructure. The SAFEr Grid team seeks to create an innovative, layered architecture for power grids that goes far beyond the current state of the art by exploring asynchronous coupling of subgrids using a store-and-forward-like principle for energy. Inspired by the successful architecture of the Internet and its well-established role models, We will contribute our expertise in power system automation, power system control, power system modeling and cyber-physical system theory to the project.