Qianxue Xia received the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) Seed Research Award for her proposed research on “Large Scale Photovoltaic and Storage Integration with a Hybrid AC/DC Power System.” 

Xia is a Ph.D. student in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), where she is advised by ECE Associate Professor Maryam Saeedifard. Suman Debnath from ORNL will serve as her project mentor.

As the penetration of utility-scale solar power increases, the inertia in the power system is reduced, and thus, the grid primary frequency response needs to be enhanced. Grid-forming inverters connecting photovoltaics (PV) to the grid, including both AC and DC types and Energy Storage Systems (ESS), are an effective and promising solution. 

Xia’s research proposal is aligned with the project “Multi-port Autonomous Reconfigurable Solar Power Plant (MARS),” funded by the U.S. Department of Energy; it focuses on the control and hardware in the loop simulation of such grid-forming inverters. The MARS is based on the concept of the modular multilevel converter that enables integration of large-scale PV+ESS systems. It can reduce the cost and losses, and most importantly, it can increase the system stability by providing inertial services and help improve the primary frequency response.