February 2017

By James Mater

Once a standard for smart grid interoperation has been adopted by an official international standards development organization (SDO), such as IEEE or IEC, products developed to that standard should be able to easily communicate in order to work together – i.e., interoperate correctly with no additional integration engineering and debugging, also known as “plug and play”. Unfortunately, the approval of a communication standard, such as OpenADR, IEEE 2030.5 or IEC 61850, is only the starting point.

By David G. Hart, M. Amin Zamani and Ashok Gopalakrishnan

Efforts focused on grid resiliency, smart grid initiatives, and clean energy are driving the growing penetration of renewable energy resources such as photovoltaic (PV) systems, wind turbines, and fuel cells. Despite their advantages, distributed energy resources (DERs) inevitably challenge the traditional operating principles of distribution systems. More specifically, a unique set of protection and control (P&C) challenges is introduced to utilities as DERs proliferate.

By Paul Pabst

Applying distributed generation on a feeder isn’t new in today’s utility environment. Many large and small utilities have established procedures for designing, installing, operating, and maintaining such generation in safe and reliable ways. But when the intent is to island the distributed generation and its loads in a microgrid environment there really aren’t any established design guides. .

By Kaveh Dehghanpour and Hashem Nehrir

A microgrid (MG) is considered the backbone of the smart grid. We are proposing an intelligent distributed multi-agent-system-based MG power management to find a unique and fair trade-off optimal solution for its operation point, using the game-theoretic concept of Nash bargaining solution.