US 12,149,080 B1
Systems and methods for fault tolerant energy management systems configured to manage heterogeneous power plants
Shaheen Fakhar, Herndon, VA (US); Christian Chia Wang, Philadelphia, PA (US); and Robert Jordan Toth, Leesburg, VA (US)
Assigned to Energy Vault, Inc., Westlake Village, CA (US)
Filed by Energy Vault, Inc., Westlake Village, CA (US)
Filed on Sep. 25, 2023, as Appl. No. 18/473,579.
Claims priority of provisional application 63/518,283, filed on Aug. 8, 2023.
Int. Cl. H02J 3/14 (2006.01)
CPC H02J 3/144 (2020.01) 30 Claims
OG exemplary drawing
 
1. A computer-implemented method of distributing tasks at a power plant, the method comprising:
distributing, by an energy management system configured to adjust power and reactive power of a power plant in real time at least partly in response to changes in grid frequency, a control function across multiple nodes in a cluster of nodes, the cluster of nodes comprising electronic devices configured to control power plant equipment and configured to provide a plurality of combinations of redundancy to control power plant equipment, each node in the cluster of nodes configurable to perform functions of a failed node in the cluster of nodes, wherein a given node in the cluster of nodes is operable to communicate with an item of power plant equipment;
designating, by the energy management system, a first node in the cluster of nodes as a lead controller;
receiving energy management system tasks at the energy management system;
passing at least a portion of the received tasks over a network from the energy management system to the first node in the cluster of nodes, the first node configured as the lead controller; and
delegating, in real time, by the first node configured as the lead controller, tasks, comprising at least a portion of the received tasks, to other nodes, configured as follower controllers, in the cluster of nodes,
at least partly in response to detecting that the first node, configured as the lead controller, in the cluster of nodes is unavailable, executing a failover process so that a second node in the cluster of nodes, configured as a follower controller, ode is designated as lead controller.