News

We have been working on our rural electrification project for more than a year and a half now. During this time, we have been researching, developing and building prototypes of our own USB-C based solar home system. With this off-grid system we intend to provide a solution to villages that do not have a grid connection. Our ultimate goal is to interconnect households to create DC microgrids and provide reliable access to electricity for all.

We planned to carry out our first field test in Ethiopia this month. Unfortunately, due to the global impact of the coronavirus pandemic, we had to postpone this field test. However, we at DC Opportunities still feel very enthusiastic to keep working on improving our prototypes.

In spite of the aforementioned challenges we were able to book some progress. Last week we have received 50 of our PCBs to assemble power-banks and in the coming weeks we expect to receive more components such as solar charging stations and power-hubs. We would like to take a moment and thank all the parties who are helping us throughout this journey including TU Delft | Global Initiative, Students4Sustainability, 3E Royal, Mekelle Institute of Technology & Victron Energy.

We are happy to announce that today Faik Nizam successfully defended his MSc thesis on “Energy Management in USB-C Based Modular Solar Home Systems” . During the past year and a half, Faik has been working within the rural electrification project focusing on implementing power delivery communication to perform the energy management of our Solar Home System. Congratulations Faik!

Last week Pedro Parreira graduated from the MSc in Electrical Engineering at TU Delft. During his thesis, he has been working on “Distributed optimal power flow for low voltage DC grids” at DC Opportunities. For the past months, Pedro developed an optimization algorithm for low-voltage DC grids which eliminates the need of a central controller. By utilizing physiscal measurements of the grid, it is now possible to control local voltage and power with the goal of minimizing cost.

https://repository.tudelft.nl/islandora/object/uuid%3A1baf1c80-9415-4f0d-810f-40777f456aed?collection=education

Today Dola, successfully defended his master’s thesis titled “Fully Distributed Optimal Power Flow”.

Abstract

There are many methods for solving an optimal power flow (OPF) problem. Most of them employ one central unit to solve the problem (centralized) while in others, every node/area computes for its coverage and send information to its neighbors every time. The mentioned method is called Distributed OPF. In this thesis, the Distributed OPF aims for a fast and resilient algorithm to solve a DC-OPF problem based on Consensus + Innovation (C+I) method. The research focuses on developing a faster algorithm in solving an OPF problem for a DC distribution grid. The current C+I method has tuning parameters, all of which are determined by trial and error for every case. They are sensitive parameters that determine the speed of the iteration to converge to the solution. This thesis attempts to form adaptive tuning parameters by understanding their function in every equation for a variable update. By understanding the purpose of each tuning parameter and the physical interpretation, some parameters can be formulated while the other is still determined by estimating the value. The losses and congestion are also taken into account. In the results, by formulating these parameters, they are shown that the iteration number has dropped significantly compared to the previous research. Regarding the resilience of the algorithm, the distributed approach relies on the information exchange between the nodes and delay on the information exchange will stall the whole iteration process. Therefore, an asynchronous algorithm is implemented to resolve the problem by setting a timeout duration. The timeout duration enables the algorithm to wait for the new information only for the desired duration, and therefore the calculation converges in faster.