Lakshan received his BE (Hons) degree in Electrical and Computer System Engineering from Monash University, Australia in 2019. Currently, he is working towards a PhD degree in Electrical Engineering at Monash University and is being supervised by A/Professor Reza Razzaghi and Professor David Hill from the Department of Electrical and Computer Systems Engineering and Professor Rob Hyndman, Head of the Department of Econometrics and Business Statistics in the Monash Business School.

The PhD is sponsored through the Zema Scholarship Fund by the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO). Lakshan’s research exemplifies the critical role of engineering research in designing and developing the technical solutions needed to optimise our power networks and increase inverter based generation while maintaining system security.

When Lakshan started his PhD in 2020, the unstable oscillations in the West Murray Zone were breaking news. Through correspondence with AEMO, he learnt that novel stability problems pose a fundamental challenge in the widespread integration of wind and solar electricity generation. This is because each new grid connection must be checked to verify it does not problematically interact with the operational inverters in the system. As the number of operational inverters increases, the number of possible interactions increases exponentially, thereby making the grid connection assessment exceedingly challenging.

Anticipating a future National Electricity Market (NEM) with many hundreds of grid-scale wind and solar connections, Lakshan focussed his efforts on developing a flexible framework for studying the dynamics introduced into power systems by inverter based resources. Foremost in this framework is identifying clusters of inverter based resources that interact strongly with each other, which he has termed Inverter Based Resource Interaction Clusters (IBRICs). “The utility of IBRICs is that they allow the power system operator to understand which operational inverters are most affected by a new grid connection. Furthermore, if at any stage an inverter-driven instability is detected in the grid, the IBRICs can help identify which devices are involved so that the instability can be mitigated with minimum disruption to the bulk system.”

While demonstrating and testing his research on open source study systems for reproducibility and to encourage academic engagement, Lakshan duly noted that one of the major challenges for AEMO in assessing inverter-driven stability is that the detailed blueprints of the inverters are kept confidential by their manufacturers. To circumvent this obstacle, Lakshan’s research made use of blackbox models that respect the intellectual property of the equipment manufacturers.

Moreover, anticipating that the future NEM would be fitted with more sensors than ever before, Lakshan sought a way to use this sensor data to facilitate stability assessment. In particular, he focused on Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs) which are state of the art sensors currently being rolled out in the NEM. Lakshan investigated a novel application of PMU data in estimating oscillatory participation factors which traditionally required omniscient knowledge of the entire power system. Finally, cognizant of the limitations of currently available PMUs, Lakshan proposed an algorithm that allows PMUs to estimate multiple frequency components and damping. Not only can such multi-PMUs be used for real-time monitoring of oscillatory stability, they also fit into Lakshan’s proposed stability framework by promising to improve the accuracy of participation factor estimation.

Lakshan is also part of the following academic research groups:

• Monash Distributed and Intelligent Power Systems
• OPTIMA