Microgrids: Planning, Protection and Control

This Special Issue will include papers related to the planning, protection, and control of smart grids and microgrids, and their applications in the industry, transportation, water, waste, and urban and residential infrastructures. Authors are encouraged to present their latest research; reviews on topics including methods, approaches, systems, and technology; and interfaces to other domains such as big data, cybersecurity, human–machine, sustainability, and smart cities. The planning side of microgrids might include technology selection, scheduling, interconnected microgrids, and their integration with regional energy infrastructures. The protection side of microgrids might include topics related to protection strategies, risk management, protection technologies, abnormal scenario assessments, equipment and system protection layers, fault diagnosis, validation and verification, and intelligent safety systems. The control side of smart grids and microgrids might include control strategies, intelligent control algorithms and systems, control architectures, technologies, embedded systems, monitoring, and deployment and implementation

Power Flow Coloring System Over a Nanogrid With Fluctuating Power Sources and Loads

Due to the excessive increase in environmental costs of nonrenewable energy resources, there have been government legislation, policies, and new technologies to control carbon emissions. The increase in renewable resources requires new strategies for the operation and management of the electricity. This paper presents the power flow coloring system, which gives a unique ID to each power flow between a specific power source and a specific power load. It allows us to design multiple power flow patterns between distributed and fluctuating power sources and loads taking into account energy availability, cost, and carbon dioxide emission. For implementation, this paper proposes a cooperative distributed control method, where a master-slave role assignment scheme of power sources and a time-slot-based feedback control are introduced to cope with power fluctuations while keeping the voltage stable. The experimental results clarify the practical feasibility of our proposed method in managing distributed fluctuating power sources and loads