1 Enabling high penetration of power electronics in the electric grid through a Global Real-Time Super Lab Antonello Monti ∗ , Marija Stevic ∗ , Steffen Vogel ∗ , Rik W. De Doncker ∗ , Ettore Bompard † , Abouzar Estbesari † , Francesco Profumo † , Rob Hovsapian ‡ , Manish Mohanpurkar ‡ , Jack David Flicker § , Vahan Gevorgian ¶ , Siddharth Suryanarayanan k , Anurag K. Srivastava ∗∗ and Andrea Benigni †† ∗ RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany Email: {amonti,mstevic,stvogel,dedoncker}@eonerc.rwth-aachen.de † Politecnico di Torino, Turin, Italy Email: {ettore.bompard,abouzar.estebsari,francesco.profumo}@polito.it ‡ Idaho National Laboratory, Idaho Falls, USA Email: {manish.mohanpurkar,rob.hovsapian}@inl.gov § Sandia National Laboratory, Idaho Falls, ID, USA Email: jdflick@sandia.gov ¶ National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Golden, CO, USA Email: vahan.gevorgian@nrel.gov k Dept. of ECE, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, USA Email: sid.suryanarayanan@colostate.edu ∗∗ Dept. of EECS, Washington State University, Pullman, WA, USA Email: anurag.k.srivastava@wsu.edu †† University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, USA Email: benignia@cec.sc.edu Abstract Global Real-Time Super Laboratory (Global RT-Super Lab) represents a vendor-neutral distributed platform established based on virtual interconnection of Digital Real-Time Simulators (DRTS) and Hardware-In-the-Loop (HIL) setups hosted at eight geographically distributed laboratories located in the USA and Europe. This article describes the efforts towards the realization of this large-scale virtual infrastructure and demonstration of the multi-lab setup for simulation and testing of next generation global power grids. I. INTRODUCTION The electric grid is changing. More in particular, power electronics is significantly transforming the power system all around the world. This change is driven by the progressive installation of Distributed Energy Resources (DER) that are typically based on a power electronics interface. This transformation is creating a completely new power-electronic driven low-inertia grid. As described in [1], this future is also closer than what we can think. Even today operations of portion of grids with only power electronics-driven sources are possible. What does that mean? In a nutshell, we are transforming an electromechanical system to an electronic system. At a first glance this is perceived as a challenge. The electromechanical system presents a dynamic behavior which is fully predictable and it can be well-represented using the 2nd Law of Newton. The consequence is that, without any control action, the system will have an intrinsic tendency to move to a new steady state operating point. This feature has been used in the classical grid to achieve system level automation without requiring high performance control and ultra- fast control reaction. The first line of reaction of the system is programmed in the physics. With power electronics this feature is gone: the response depends on the control. While this is perceived as a challenge, it can actually be seen as an opportunity. A new world is open for power electronics and power system engineer to design the grid of the future. In this sense many ideas are emerging. Converters connected to the grid can present different behavior [2] depending on their control architecture. Particularly interesting is the emerging need of converters that are able to perform the so-called ”grid-forming” operation. These © 2018 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works. doi: 10.1109/MPEL.2018.2850698 Publisher version: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8458285