Design and Experimentation Guidelines for DER’s Emulation Testbed

Due to the increasing integration of distributed energy resources (DERs) into the national grid, research is needed to understand high DER penetration in relation to grid reliability and stability. Emulation-based research is a viable option to consider hardware intensive investigations. Indeed, DER emulation-based research has advantages over DER software-based simulation and real DER implementation research. Some of these advantages are more realistic performance and boundaries and considerably less expense, higher safety, and modularity. While the downside of DER emulation-based research is the complexity of modeling large scale grid systems. This paper provides a rationalization for the selection of an emulation-based DER laboratory and description of the DER laboratory’s capabilities. Additionally, guidelines for running experiments are discussed and two approaches, power scaling using rescaling coefficients and system sizing using Multi-Port Thevenin Equivalence (MPTE), are proposed to emulate realistic complex interconnected DER grid connected systems.