Collaborative and Autonomous Black Start: Theory and Implementation

As the number of and capabilities of distributed and inverter-based energy resources increase, there is also an increasing opportunity to utilize such devices to provide resilience to large-scale power outages. During traditional power system restoration, natural hazard disruption or cyber attack of a central controller could cause the necessary processes to halt, but self-determining, decentralized schemes provide new opportunities for robustness. Therefore, a collaborative, autonomous restoration method is proposed and demonstrated in the field on a test microgrid with distributed energy resources. The methodology and test set-up is described and field demonstration results provided. The novel method is shown to effectively black start the microgrid using grid-forming inverter-based resources in a decentralized fashion, enabling future grid reliability even in the face of natural hazards and cyber disruptions.