A Wireless-Assisted Hierarchical Framework to Accommodate Mobile Energy Resources

Abstract

The societal decarbonisation fosters the installation of massive renewable inverter-based resources (IBRs) in replacing fossil fuel based traditional energy supply. The efficient and reliable operation of distributed IBRs requires advanced Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), which may lead to a huge infrastructure investment and long construction time for remote communities. Therefore, to efficiently manage IBRs, we propose a low-cost hierarchical structure, especially for remote communities without existing strong ICT connections, that combines the advantages of centralised and distributed frameworks via advanced wireless communication technologies. More specifically, dispatchable resources are controlled via a regional aggregated controller, and the corresponding regional information flow is enabled by a device-to-device (D2D) communication assisted wireless network. The wireless network can fully reuse the bandwidth to improve data flow efficiency, leading to a flexible information structure that can accommodate the plug-and-play operation of mobile IBRs. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed wireless communication scheme significantly improves the utilization of existing bandwidth, and the dynamically allocated wireless system ensures the flexible operation of mobile IBRs.