ACTION

The ACTION project aims at developing, implementing and demonstrating smart, highly efficient and cost-effective active-front end (AFE) converters at the grid interface of various electrical motor applications, in order to tap into their vast flexibility potentials.

Currently, electric vehicles, heat pumps and thermostatically controlled loads are considered as the main sources of flexibility at the demand side that have mainly been considered as units with flexible active power consumption. However, in addition to fine active power regulation ability, AFE converters can also actively influence current and voltage waveforms on the grid, thereby act as grid supporting elements, and even improve the power quality on the connected grid. AFEs can also act as sensors and with right intelligence may provide to grid operators real-time information about the state of the drive system and the grid, thereby serving as intelligent distributed sensors.

By combining the information from a population of many distributed AFEs, an insight on system conditions necessary to run an aggregated grid load optimization (e.g. peak shaving, energy cost minimization, voltage profile leveling, coordinated frequency support etc.) can be carried out and support the relevant DSO / TSO entities.