A Study on Electric Energy Packet Transmission for Effective Use of Small Scale Power Plants in Metropolitan Areas

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Public interest in environment and site problems of utility's large scale power plants tend to encourage the effective use of small scale dispersed generation plants such as photovoltaic cell, cogeneration and fuel cell in metropolitan areas. Such dispersed plants generate a small amount of electric energy individually and the most of them would be owned by consumers. In addition, the quality and supply reliability of the generated electricity depend on each plant. If a lot of dispersed generation plants are interconnected with the utility's power network in metropolitan areas and the surplus electric energy can be supplied to the other consumers through the network, then it would be difficult to monitor and control the energy flow in the centralized manner which is adopted by the existing power utilities.In this study, a new method for electric power flow control is developed for overcoming the difficulties associated with the interconnection of dispersed generation plants. The major … More results obtained through the study are as follows.(1) A novel method of electric power flow control is developed which is based on electric energy storage and real time communication. The most important concept in the method is that the surplus electric energy generated by each dispersed plant is treated as a packet of electricity, and the information about sender (plant) and receiver (consumer) is attached to this packet as a tag. The concept makes it possible that electric energy can flow autonomously from the specified power plant to the specified consumers without the centralized monitoring and control of entire power flows. The packet of electricity is called "Electric Energy Packet"(2) In order to achieve the autonomous flow of Electric Energy Packet, a new device for power flow control is devised which consists of electric energy storage device and multi terminal AC-DC converters. The new device is called "Electric Energy Router".(3) The methods to determine the size and the way of power flow control action of Electric Energy Router are developed by applying queuing theory and optimal control theory.(4) A small scale prototype of Electric Energy Router is manufactured for trial. Less