Development of situational awareness and proactive control techniques in the reliability improvement of power distribution networks

Abstract

The modernization of power energy system, under the conception of smart grids, has been brought innumerous challenges to the distribution system control and operation. The insertion of renewable energy sources into distribution networks makes hard the tradeoff between energy supply and demand due to the intermittent behavior of these sources. Flexible loads, such as batteries and electrical vehicles, must integrate the distribution networks aiding in the power balance. Hence, the conventional approach, know as fit-and-forget, should be replaced by updated techniques of proactive operations to the electrical devices that are installed over the power distribution feeders. The integrated architecture of the advanced distribution management system increases the situational awareness that encourage the development of a new predictive risk based decision-making framework with the capability to improve the reliability of distribution networks by enhancing the understanding of the system operator about the impacts of the power energy supply interruption. In addition, the proactive risk control embedded in the new techniques of distribution automation contributes to elevate the energy quality through the predictive risk mitigation. Small computation units, which are connected into strategic nodes of distribution feeders and into active loads, should provide information and communication technologies to the distribution automation in cooperation with the conventional relaying technologies inside the power substation. The development of these computation units using data abstraction models and communication protocols based on international standards must ensure the security and interoperability support, but it also represents a challenge to be overcome because of the technological innovation surrounding its development. (AU)