The University of Tennessee at Knoxville, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Electric Power Research Institute collaborated on GridDamper, a field-deployment-ready technology to mitigate three major categories of oscillations (natural, forced and sub-synchronous) and allow more renewable electricity in power grids. GridDamper adaptively updates its parameters, sensors and actuators to guarantee power grid stability and reliability when renewable energy and electricity demand fluctuate.

The increasing integration of renewable energy has created more severe, complex and frequent oscillations. If not sufficiently controlled, they can lead to major blackout events that cost billions of dollars. Effective suppression of various oscillations is essential to maintain the secure and reliable operation of power grids.

A unique quality of GridDamper is the adaptive capability to select optimal sensors and actuators and update the controller parameters according to its real-time awareness of the grid operating condition. Also, GridDamper can handle various communication uncertainties to guarantee optimal performance.

This field-deployment-ready technology has been demonstrated through various hardware-in-the-loop tests using realistic large-scale power grid models and actual oscillation events. The field deployment is currently taking place at the TERNA control center in Italy.