Today’s electric power distribution systems have limited observability and diagnostic capabilities. In high-voltage power transmission, visibility and situational awareness have been a vital area f
or technological R&D and investment in recent years. Distribution systems are lagging several decades behind, for good reason: there was historically no need, nor a business case, to develop similar capabilities. Owing to the relative simplicity of power distribution – i.e., mostly radial layout of circuits with one-way power flow – it was necessary only to evaluate the envelope of design operating conditions (such as peak loads or fault currents) rather than continually observe the actual operating state. Accordingly, legacy distribution circuits are equipped with little instrumentation beyond the substation. But the growth of distributed energy resources (DER) such as solar photovoltaics, electric vehicles, automated demand response and distributed storage introduces significant variability and new uncertainties, as well as opportunities to recruit diverse resources for grid services. This development dramatically increases the need and value proposition for tools to better observe, understand and manage the grid at the distribution scale.
For more information feel free to contact Dr. Reza Arghandeh, FSU and Dr. Alexandra von Meier, UC Berkeley. ... [more]