Design and implementation of a real-time hardware-in-the-loop platform for prototyping and testing digital twins of distributed energy resources

Power systems worldwide are experiencing rapid evolvements with a massive increase of renewable generation in order to meet the ambitious decarbonization targets. A significant amount of renewable generation is from Distributed Energy Resources (DERs), upon which the system operators often have limited visibility. This can bring significant challenges as the increasing DERs' can lead to network constraints being violated, presenting critical risks for network security. Enhancing the visibility of DERs can be achieved via the provision of communication links, but this can be costly, particularly for real time applications. Digital Twin (DT) is an emerging technology that is considered as a promising solution for enhancing the visibility of a physical system, where only a limited set of data is required to be transmitted with the rest data of interest can be estimated via the DT. The development and demonstration of DTs requires realistic testing and validation environment in order to accelerate its adoption in the industry. This paper presents a real time simulation and hardware-in-the-loop (HiL) testing platform, specifically designed for prototyping, demonstrating and testing DTs of DERs. Within the proposed platform, a software-based communication emulator is developed, which allows the investigation of the impact of communication latency and jitter on the performance of DTs of the DERs. Case studies are presented to demonstrate the application of the developed DT prototyping process and testing platform to enable frequency control using the DTs, which provide valuable learnings and tools for enabling future DTs-based solutions.