Experimental characterization of communication infrastructure for virtual power plant monitoring

Abstract

In modern distribution systems, the wide presence of Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) (e.g. intermittent and non-programmable renewable sources, such as photovoltaic power plants and micro wind turbines), is going to cause increasing problems in the traditional management of the distribution grid. Recently, the use of Distributed Energy Storage Systems (DESSs) has been proposed to limit the impact of renewable power plants on the distribution grid. The presence of a large number of production plants distributed along the grid, which are able to interact between them, requires the Distribution System Operator (DSO) to adopt a proper monitoring system. To allow such an implementation, a communication and a computing architecture able to virtualize several renewable power plants installed in the same area is described in the present work. The proposed architecture can simplify the monitoring from the DSO, using the so-called Virtual Power Plant (VPP) approach. The proposed architecture has been deployed in the area of the Campus of the University of Brescia, Italy, for the monitoring of two photovoltaic (PV) plants and two different Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESSs). The implemented infrastructure makes use of several technologies, such as IEEE 802.11ac and Long Term Evolution (LTE). The characterization of the communication infrastructure highlights the feasibility of the proposed approach (the latency is less than 20 ms in the worst case over IEEE 802.11ac links with a traffic load of 80 Mbit/s). To show the performance of such a solution, the data collected from a system composed by a PV field (64 kWp) and a Li-Ion storage system (25 kWh) has been reported.