Marco Pasetti

Experimental characterization of communication infrastructure for virtual power plant monitoring

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.

On the integration of E-Vehicle data for advanced management of private electrical charging systems

The management of modern power grids requires the integration of performing communication systems, capable of enabling the interconnection and the interaction between different devices, such as distributed energy resources, storage systems and protections. Recently, the increasing diffusion of E-Vehicles (EVs) is going to introduce an additional player that should be taken into consideration for the development of future grid management systems: the electrical charging station. Even though each charging station requires only limited power from the grid (up to 44 kW in alternating current and up to 150 kW in direct current), the installation of a large number of devices could introduce relevant issues to the grid management and control, mainly due to the unpredictability of the power demand profiles of EVs. Typically, EVs and electrical charging stations exchange information about the required charging current, but, commonly, few data are available about the State of Charge (SOC) of the EV battery and the typical EV usage profile. The availability of such information, however, represents a key factor for the optimal management of energy flows, especially in private grids managed by an Energy Management System (EMS). In this paper, a gateway for the communication among an EV and a local information system has been designed and deployed in a real system. The proposed device is able to directly recover data from the EV On Board Diagnostic (OBD) system. The feasibility of the proposed approach has been validated by monitoring the SOC of an EV over one month.

A smart PV module with integrated electrical storage for smart grid applications

The increasing penetration of intermittent Distributed Energy Resources (DERs), such as PhotoVoltaic (PV), into Distribution Networks (DNs) and Microgrids (μgs) is posing relevant challenges to the power system operations and control. Thus, there is a growing interest for the development of innovative solutions to reduce the uncertainty of these resources and to properly manage their intrinsic variability. This paper proposes an innovative PV solution in which the PV module is equipped with on-board Energy Storage Systems (ESSs) to properly manage the charge/discharge cycle of the ESS while implementing the Maximum Power Point Tracking (MPPT) of the PV source. Furthermore, the system is capable to communicate with the external grid in order to allow the implementation of advanced network services, such as power support, to the DN.