Demonstration and experience of the smart rural grid project

Smart Grid Architecture for Rural Distribution Networks: Application to a Spanish Pilot Network

“…After deploying the innovative grid architecture and addressing the adoption of both new management tools and technologies, the PN will become deeply transformed, resulting in the scheme depicted in Figure 2. Next, the above actions for upgrading the rural grid are listed [18,26,32,39], and the following subsections go deeper into describing the above updates for developing the rural grid: promoting the distributed generation (detailed in Section 3.1); including new protection devices (detailed in Section 3.2); installing back-up resources (detailed in Section 3.3); deploying a proper telecommunications network (detailed in Section 3.4); developing new control and management agents (detailed in Section 3.5); and (detailed in Section 3.6).…”

“…The IDPR is a modular power converter connected in parallel with the low voltage grid and it can be connected with an energy storage device. Moreover, the control system of the IDPR is easily managed by the system operator setpoints as well as a permanent monitoring of the power flow upstream and downstream of its coupling point via Modbus RTU protocol In terms of performance, the power stage implements an extremely compact transformer-less topology based on the new highly efficient silicon carbide power semiconductor devices [26,39,45]. Figure 3 presents the IDPR architecture.…”

“…This subsection presents the performance of the IDPR in the LV grid [26]. The waveform recording is carried out with an oscilloscope, and then the data is processed and treated with the mathematical software Matlab (R2014b, MathWorks, Natick, MA, USA).Four different scenarios are proposed in order to test the IDPR contributions to improve the power quality of the grid:…”

“…Both the scientific community and industry are proposing and adopting different actuations to transform traditional distribution grids into active, Smart Grid ones [3,7,9,10,[14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27]. In this sense, actuations mainly tackle the exploitation of new communication capabilities and distributed energy resources.…”

“…They also refer to allowing for an increased potential to inherently accommodate the integration and distribution of renewable energy sources. Moreover, it enables new operation modes that guarantee the continuity of supply and reliability even in the case of the external failure conditions [18,26,28,[30][31][32].…”