Chair of Decentralized Energy Systems and Electrical Engineering in Power Plants
The Chair is headed by the Guest professor
Nowadays, research in the field of electrical energy supply is of essential importance and will remain significant in the future. The main focus here is the integration of renewable energy sources into the public energy grids. In the last years the installed capacity of units based on renewable energies, and mainly wind energy and photovoltaic installations, has strongly increased. Predictions in this field show that this trend will stay unchanged in the coming years. In the future, the renewable-energy-plants, which possess approximately the same capacity as the traditional power plant units, will be of great interest. Such research also includes the development of the offshore-wind energy parks and large scale solar parks with the two-digit Megawatt range.
Nowadays, the demand in new requirements of the more secure and efficient supply of electrical energy from renewable energy is increasing. This is mainly caused by the strong fluctuations of these electrical generators and their load supply, which largely does not meet the requirements of the current demand. Hence, the main tasks are defined by the technically and economically sustainable interactions of renewable and traditional energy generation and their transmission and distribution. Energy systems in the future should be able to operate safe and efficient under the aforementioned conditions. Therefore, planning, design and construction of the energy systems with regard to high supply security become a priority.
Consequently the Chair of Decentralized Energy Systems and Electrical Engineering in Power Plants puts the main emphasis in its research works on the following issues:
- Energy generation from renewable energies and their integration into the grid.
Apart from the study of single installations and their operation, integration of many renewable energy (RE)-installations into the RE-plants will be examined. Important aspects here are the investigation of internal grids of the RE-plants and the operation of RE-plants in the system of transmission and distribution grids. Priority in this study is the examination of the requirements to the operation under normal conditions, under critical grid situations, as well as under fault conditions. Here such issues as, reactive power balance, voltage stability and minimization of losses stay on the foreground. Such study is enabled by the possibilities of the Research and Training Centre „System Security of Electrical Grids“ at BTU Cottbus.
Furthermore, there is a need to study the requirements to the controllability of RE-plants and the in-feed forms, which are compatible with the public power grids, as well as the possibility of temporary storage.
Moreover, the examination of the high-capacity offshore wind parks plays an important role.
- Feed-in and auxiliary systems of the traditional power plants
An important focus in the research is the study and development of new generating units and their integration to the grids with strongly fluctuating wind energy in-feeds. Nowadays, traditional power plants are subject to more dynamic operation modes and more loads than in the last decades. Therefore, it is important to make adjustments to the Catalogue of Requirements for the construction of new power plants in view of the more dynamic operation mode, in order to balance the fluctuations caused by the renewable energy in-feeds and to maintain the necessary balance between generation and consumption in electrical systems. An intensive work on a simulation model has been carried out in order to compose such requirements.
The “classical” topics in power plant auxiliary systems are also important areas of research work at the chair. Design of auxiliary systems, appropriate dimensioning of switch gear and electrical equipment, an optimal cable selection as well as specific problems of protection techniques belong here. Moreover, a long standing work in the field of fault current limitation in power station auxiliary systems has been carried forward.
