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NACRE, a digital twin for the design of RTE’s future power grid control system

© Matthew Henry / Unsplash
CEA-List is working with RTE on the design of the power grid infrastructure operator’s future power grid control system. As the proportion of intermittently-produced renewable energy on the grid rises, RTE’s main challenge is to increase flexibility without compromising on safety or reliability. CEA-List used rigorous model-driven engineering to build a modeling, simulation, and analysis platform for the design of the new system.

Highly distributed renewable energy production—which cannot be managed—and the electrification of new use cases are growing. The grid must be able to adapt to an increasingly diverse and unpredictable landscape on both the supply and demand sides. CEA-List is working with RTE’s R&D department to design its future power transmission control system—a major challenge in this context.
RTE’s current transmission control system is made up of a local level, with line protection, and a national level, with dispatching, forecasting, and programming capabilities. To increase flexibility, RTE wanted to add a middle “area” level and make the control system more distributed and digital.
CEA-List drew on its experience modeling and simulating complex systems to arrive at the optimal functional and hardware architecture to deliver the desired flexibility, reliability, and safety performance.

With expertise spanning model-driven engineering, system architecture, real-time simulation, formal methods for distributed systems, and smart grids, CEA-List was ideally positioned to tackle this project. The result is a modeling and simulation platform and associated analysis method for RTE’s target control system.


The NACRE demonstrator. Left : power transmission control architecture modeling. Right : power grid simulation. © CEA


 

The platform, built using CEA-List’s open-source systems engineering software Papyrus, enables the rigorous modeling and simulation of various possible control system architectures. Simulations can be run to observe how an architecture will behave in different unforeseen event scenarios.

Modelling was completed in three stages:

  1. Power system control architecture
  2. Computing and network architecture
  3. Unforeseen event scenarios

 

The following three aspects of the situation modeled are then simulated:

  1. Each control device’s behavior, based on RTE’s predictive control algorithms
  2. Routing of messages over the communication network, including unforeseen events
  3. The physical state of the power grid, including any electrotechnical equipment (generators and batteries) connected to the grid

 

The results of the simulation are then evaluated according to safety and performance criteria like the risk of line damage or energy losses, for example.

The NACRE platform was implemented by CEA-List and RTE in 2024 to test two architectures, one centralized and one distributed, on five control areas in scenarios that included unforeseen events. The NACRE program was extended for an additional three years at the end of 2024.

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Although NACRE was designed to meet the needs of RTE, it is based on methods and tools that can be applied to a variety of use cases. With some adaptations, the same kind of platform could be developed for other energy systems. The gas distribution network, which, with the arrival of biogas, is affected by flexibility-related challenges similar to those of power grids, is one particularly relevant example.

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What made the NACRE platform a success? Our know-how in modeldriven engineering, our ability to integrate a wide range of technologies, and the quality of our collaboration with RTE.

Rebecca Cabean

Stéphane Salmons

Research engineer, project manager and laboratory head — CEA-List

Contributors to this article

  • Stéphane Salmons, Research engineer, project manager and laboratory head
  • Mathilde Arnaud, Research Engineer
  • Arnault Lapitre, Research engineer
  • Yves Lhuillier, Research engineer
  • Asma Smaoui, Research Engineer
  • Patrick Tessier, Research engineer

See also

Software development environments

Papyrus

A model-based system engineering (MBSE) platform to facilitate the design of complex hardware and/or software systems.
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