New grid lab coming in Germany
Visualization of the HPGL (Graphic: Nadine Rönnau)
A new €32.8 million ($35.5 million) ‘High Power Grid Lab’ is to be developed at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in southern Germany.
The intent of the new grid lab is to investigate new grid technologies such as power converters for MV grids in a test environment that replicates the real power grid as precisely as possible.
The focus is on low and medium voltage grids for regional power distribution, forming a bridge for the rapid transfer of research results into practical application.
“With the High Power Grid Lab, we are creating a globally unique research environment to investigate the behaviour of innovative grid equipment under realistic conditions,” says Professor Marc Hiller, Head of the Institute of Electrical Engineering (ETI) at KIT.
“This infrastructure will play a crucial role in developing new technologies for the transformation of our power grids.”
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The High Power Grid Lab, which is being developed with €32.8 million ($35 million) from the Helmholtz Association, will form part of the Energy Lab at KIT.
The Smart Energy System Simulation and Control Centre of the Energy Lab combines the real-time simulation of power grids with the emulators for MV grids that will be available in the High Power Grid Lab in the future.
The real-time simulation determines the system behaviour of the power grids, while the emulators replicate this behaviour in the real world with real power flow. The result is a flexible test environment – ‘power hardware in the loop’ – whose behaviour represents the real grid as accurately as possible.
For example, the flow of energy from one MV grid to another can be regulated.
Considered one of the largest research platforms in Europe, the Energy Lab real-world laboratory links test facilities for power generation, energy storage and energy use with each other in order to develop an intelligent overall system for energy supply.
Lukas Stefanski, scientific and technical project manager at the High Power Grid Lab, says the MV emulators used are being developed specifically for this project.
“We can emulate AC grids up to 20kV and DC grids up to 35kV without a transformer up to an output of 40MVA. This is a decisive step forward for research into high performance technologies for the increasingly important MV distribution grids.”
The High Power Grid Lab is due to go into operation in 2030.
