Development of A Co-simulator for Smart Grid with Communication Network

Description

Facing the urgent need of reducing the greenhouse gas emission and increasing the efficiency of electricity utilization, traditional power delivery network is unable to cope with the new requirement. Renewable energy resources like solar PV panels and wind turbines are being integrated into the power grid network. In addition, the installation of roof-top PV panels and small wind turbines becomes popular in residential households. These additional energy sources become distributed energy sources and they will inject energy into the power grid. For the existing power grid systems, almost all of them are designed to delivery electricity to consumers. However, the renewable energy sources cause the power flow in the grid no longer in one direction. The renewable energy resources connected to the power grid results in a more advanced and complex power grid – smart grid. For the traditional power grid system, the control is usually achieved through a dedicated communication system, typical one is the SCADA (Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition) framework. With smart grid, the control and co-ordination of various stakeholders creates a complicated scenario. New distributed energy sources can be introduced as required and they must communicate with the central control system in form of “Plug and Play” manner. All these new installations must communicate with the central control station such that their operation conditions and status can be monitored and analyzed so as to avoid disaster happening. The intermittent nature of renewable energy sources and changing power demand pattern has a profound impact on the smart grid. The success of the smart grid relies on an advanced communication infrastructure with support for security and real-time communication. To study the impact of communication latency to the operation of smart grid, a co-simulator incorporating the power system simulator and communication network simulator will be developed. This co-simulator allows user to vary the architecture of the communication network for studying the latency effects.The objectives of this project are as follow: 1. To develop a co-simulator that incorporates the power system and communication network for simulating the operation of the smart grid. 2. To incorporate the IEC 61850 and 61400 communication standard to the DER (distributed energy resource) for realistic operational analysis 3. To develop agents to cater for different types of event handling.