Smart adaptive distribution systems for the new smart grid

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Smart grid electrical systems are being deployed at an accelerated rate worldwide. About 200 million smart meters have been installed to this time worldwide, 40 million of them in North America. The next major challenge for the industry and its shareholders is to develop applications that can justify this investment. While the deployment of smart meters, solar and wind generation, smart energy systems, microgrids, and electrical vehicles is happening at the customer level, power distribution systems, which are the direct interface between the power utility and the new smart grid systems, remain basically unchanged. It is estimated by major energy systems think tanks that the next major step in the evolution of the power grid will be the integration of distribution systems automation (DA) with the advanced metering infrastructure (AMI). The goal of this project is to develop Distribution System Automation tools at substation and feeder levels that can increase the degree of sophistication of these systems to match the requirements of the customer-level smart energy systems. The project focuses on Feeder Side Management (FSM) to even out the load and spare capacity requirements of individual feeders. Even though Demand Side Management (DSM) can contribute to flatten the demand curve at the customer level, FSM can result in considerable savings in system capacity costs by evening out the load carrying responsibility among multiple feeders. To accommodate for peak load values and maintain continuity of supply during faults, distribution feeders at present have a large value of capacity redundancy. This project will use the vast amount of data that will be made available by smart meters at the customer and feeder levels to develop novel load dynamics and load forecasting models which, combined with feeder reconfiguration strategies, can considerably reduce the needed feeder spare capacity. It is expected that considerable savings in distribution system substation and feeder investments will result from the deployment of these technologies.