On the Impact of Communication and Information Access on Wind Farm Control and Demand Management in Smart Grid Scenarios
The Smart Grid utilizes the communication infrastructure and the ability to have twoway communication between entities in the power grid, in order to improve the control in the power grid. The Smart Grid involves several different technical disciplines which must interact with each other in order to fulfill the vision of the Smart Grid. Targets of applications of the Smart Grid include to stabilize the frequency, ensure voltage quality, and balance the power consumption/production by utilizing information gathered from entities in the power grid. Many of these applications utilize information that is not locally available, and it is thus important to consider the impact of communication networks and data access procedures on such an application. The thesis investigates three different Smart Grid applications, which are optimized for data access scheduling based on communication networks. The three scenarios are chosen as they cover different time horizons in terms of control loop duration, from less than a second to minutes. The first scenario is a wind farm scenario, where a central controller regulates geographically distributed wind turbines. The second scenario concerns demand management of supermarket temperature controlled entities. Finally the thesis considers the interplay between several Smart Grid controllers in order to provide insights on how these controllers would jointly affect the Smart Grid and how the latter is impacted by the different performance metrics of the remote information access. In order to evaluate the impact of communication networks on controller performance a co simulation framework has been created. This framework allows simulation of control and communication networks together in the same simulation. The thesis starts by showing how communication network and information access delay can cause decreases in performance of the controllers in both scenarios. Once the impact of communication networks on control simulations has been analyzed, information access and scheduling strategies have been designed to help alleviate the performance decrease of the controller experienced due to the communication network. The last part of the thesis is a simulation of the interplay between several controllers in a Smart Grid scenario, specifically in a MV/LV grid. The simulation analyzes the joint impact of multiple smart grid controllers while also including a time varying price. Finally, the impact of the communication network performance for the communication