Microgrids: Legal and Regulatory Hurdles for a More Resilient Energy Infrastructure

Natural disasters and climate change have made it apparent that energy infrastructure needs to be modernized and microgrids are one type of technology that can help the electricity grid become more resilient, reliable, and efficient. Different states have begun developing microgrid pilot projects including California, New York, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania. The City of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania is the first city to propose implementing “energy districts” of microgrids that will serve as critical infrastructure, in the first phase, and then expand to commercial and community settings. This large project involves many shareholders including public utilities, government agencies, and private entities. Utilizing microgrids on such a large scale raises issues regarding its classification, as energy generation or energy storage, and whether it should be regulated by public utilities, private entities, or municipalities. In a state like Pennsylvania where the energy market has been deregulated, there is strong concern on what the public utilities involvement will be with microgrid projects. This Note focuses on the regulatory issues that are raised with the construction and operation of microgrids at such a large scale in Pittsburgh. It addresses the difficulties that arise when implementing microgrids in a deregulated energy market state such as Pennsylvania, where little to no statutory language exists regarding microgrids. It will give an overview of proposed Pennsylvania legislation that may impact a public utilities’ control over microgrid technology and the benefits and costs when examining the extent of the public utilities’ role regarding ownership and control of microgrids in a deregulated energy market

Cooperative energy management for a cluster of households prosumers

© 2016 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other worksThe increment of electrical and electronic appliances for improving the lifestyle of residential consumers had led to a larger demand of energy. In order to supply their energy requirements, the consumers have changed the paradigm by integrating renewable energy sources to their power grid. Therefore, consumers become prosumers in which they internally generate and consume energy looking for an autonomous operation. This paper proposes an energy management system for coordinating the operation of distributed household prosumers. It was found that better performance is achieved when cooperative operation with other prosumers in a neighborhood environment is achieved. Simulation and experimental results validate the proposed strategy by comparing the performance of islanded prosumers with the operation in cooperative modePeer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Renewable energy in remote communities

This article is the result of a competitively tendered University-funded project, this brings together two major Government Policy areas: sustainable communities and use of carbon fuels, and is aimed at influencing the policy debate on the difficulties of linking remote communities to renewable energy production because of poor distribution networks. Linkage with the Sustainable Communities agenda is an essential ingredient, as the proposal is that the renewable energy technologies will be installed and maintained by the communities themselves

Hydrogen vs. Battery in the long-term operation. A comparative between energy management strategies for hybrid renewable microgrids

The growth of the world’s energy demand over recent decades in relation to energy intensity and demography is clear. At the same time, the use of renewable energy sources is pursued to address decarbonization targets, but the stochasticity of renewable energy systems produces an increasing need for management systems to supply such energy volume while guaranteeing, at the same time, the security and reliability of the microgrids. Locally distributed energy storage systems (ESS) may provide the capacity to temporarily decouple production and demand. In this sense, the most implemented ESS in local energy districts are small–medium-scale electrochemical batteries. However, hydrogen systems are viable for storing larger energy quantities thanks to its intrinsic high mass-energy density. To match generation, demand and storage, energy management systems (EMSs) become crucial. This paper compares two strategies for an energy management system based on hydrogen-priority vs. battery-priority for the operation of a hybrid renewable microgrid. The overall performance of the two mentioned strategies is compared in the long-term operation via a set of evaluation parameters defined by the unmet load, storage efficiency, operating hours and cumulative energy. The results show that the hydrogen-priority strategy allows the microgrid to be led towards island operation because it saves a higher amount of energy, while the battery-priority strategy reduces the energy efficiency in the storage round trip. The main contribution of this work lies in the demonstration that conventional EMS for microgrids’ operation based on battery-priority strategy should turn into hydrogen-priority to keep the reliability and independence of the microgrid in the long-term operation

A Hybrid Microgrid Operated by PV Wind and Diesel Generator with Advanced Control Strategy

All for a local area that gets its power from a solitary diesel generator (DG), this examination presents an efficient power energy choice for a microgrid. A twin feed enlistment generator draws power from a sun oriented photovoltaic (PV) cluster and the breeze to run this microgrid's electrical gear (DFIG). Two voltage source converters (VSCs) are sequentially coupled on the rotor side of the DFIG and share a DC transport that at last prompts the photovoltaic modules. Likewise associated with a similar DC transport as the DFIG stator is a bidirectional buck/help DC converter and a battery energy capacity (BES) to retain any overflow power. Most extreme energy collecting from the breeze and sun is accomplished by regulation of the bidirectional buck/help DC converter and the rotor side VSC. A changed form of the irritate and notice (P&O) technique is introduced for of expanding the energy result of a PV framework. Endeavors are being made to change VSC on the heap side to further develop DG's eco-friendliness. The ideal fuel-use reference DG power result may now be resolved utilizing a new, more broad methodology. Using the Sim Power Systems toolbox in MATLAB, we model and simulate many scenarios, including fluctuating wind speeds, fluctuating insolation, the impact of fluctuating load conditions on a bidirectional converter, and an unbalanced nonlinear load linked at the point of common coupling (PCC). Finding sinusoidal and balanced DG and DFIG stator currents

Software Defined Networks based Smart Grid Communication: A Comprehensive Survey

The current power grid is no longer a feasible solution due to ever-increasing user demand of electricity, old infrastructure, and reliability issues and thus require transformation to a better grid a.k.a., smart grid (SG). The key features that distinguish SG from the conventional electrical power grid are its capability to perform two-way communication, demand side management, and real time pricing. Despite all these advantages that SG will bring, there are certain issues which are specific to SG communication system. For instance, network management of current SG systems is complex, time consuming, and done manually. Moreover, SG communication (SGC) system is built on different vendor specific devices and protocols. Therefore, the current SG systems are not protocol independent, thus leading to interoperability issue. Software defined network (SDN) has been proposed to monitor and manage the communication networks globally. This article serves as a comprehensive survey on SDN-based SGC. In this article, we first discuss taxonomy of advantages of SDNbased SGC.We then discuss SDN-based SGC architectures, along with case studies. Our article provides an in-depth discussion on routing schemes for SDN-based SGC. We also provide detailed survey of security and privacy schemes applied to SDN-based SGC. We furthermore present challenges, open issues, and future research directions related to SDN-based SGC.Comment: Accepte

Holistic Measures for Evaluating Prediction Models in Smart Grids

The performance of prediction models is often based on "abstract metrics" that estimate the model's ability to limit residual errors between the observed and predicted values. However, meaningful evaluation and selection of prediction models for end-user domains requires holistic and application-sensitive performance measures. Inspired by energy consumption prediction models used in the emerging "big data" domain of Smart Power Grids, we propose a suite of performance measures to rationally compare models along the dimensions of scale independence, reliability, volatility and cost. We include both application independent and dependent measures, the latter parameterized to allow customization by domain experts to fit their scenario. While our measures are generalizable to other domains, we offer an empirical analysis using real energy use data for three Smart Grid applications: planning, customer education and demand response, which are relevant for energy sustainability. Our results underscore the value of the proposed measures to offer a deeper insight into models' behavior and their impact on real applications, which benefit both data mining researchers and practitioners.Comment: 14 Pages, 8 figures, Accepted and to appear in IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, 2014. Authors' final version. Copyright transferred to IEE