Gridlab Dispatch

Authors: Fabrizio Sossan
Last update: 01 February 2025

The dispatch is a reduced-scale experimental infrastructure to reproduce the generation of electricity into a power system. Several production units and two power lines are rescaled (voltage reduced to 400 V and power levels reduced by a factor of 5000) to all fit into a laboratory. Actual industrial rotating machines and commercial inverters reproduce the injection into the grid coming from either 100 MW hydro, 15 MW solar, and 3 MW wind production sites.

Hydropower

The four production units of an existing 65-kV 100-MW hydropower plant, as well as the relative overhead transmission lines, are reproduced in smaller sizes. The full-size Pelton and Francis turbines (two units each) are emulated with brushless motors driven by programmable drives.

Solar and wind power

The power production of a 15 MWp PV power plant and a 3 MW horizontal-axis wind turbine are emulated with two 3 kW programmable DC sources coupled to two three-phase power converters, implementing MPPT trackers and nonlinear production curves of photovoltaic cells and wind generators.