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The Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC) just published a new white paper about microgrids. It's entitled “Applying the Industrial Internet Reference Model to a Smart Grid Testbed” This paper represents part of an ongoing IIC collaboration for development of a microgrid testbed. The collaboration includes Cisco, National Instruments, and RTI.
This new white paper is a good read and gives a fine and concise example of applying the Industrial Internet Reference Architecture (IIRA) to a microgrid application. You can read the paper here. It’s a short paper and well worth it.
The paper defines a microgrid as follows:
A microgrid is typically deployed for a large campus (for example, college and corporate campuses, large hospitals, large factory sites and residential communities) and operated by the owners of these properties, commercial operators or utilities.
This definition is an excellent match for the situation in many of today’s grids, though perhaps not as accurate for microgrids in the long term as they become more residential. The identified stakeholders in a microgrid are:
The IIC also identifies the major components of a microgrid as follows (refer to the figure):
A few observations about this:
There is a big opportunity here to define standards that can be used on grids worldwide. Today in North America there are a handful of ISOs and their market rules and practices are different and are only gradually becoming harmonized. Solid (and working!) microgrid standards could easily be adopted by larger grid operators to speed this harmonization.
This new white paper is a good read and gives a fine and concise example of applying the Industrial Internet Reference Architecture (IIRA) to a microgrid application. You can read the paper here. It’s a short paper and well worth it.
The paper defines a microgrid as follows:
A microgrid is typically deployed for a large campus (for example, college and corporate campuses, large hospitals, large factory sites and residential communities) and operated by the owners of these properties, commercial operators or utilities.
This definition is an excellent match for the situation in many of today’s grids, though perhaps not as accurate for microgrids in the long term as they become more residential. The identified stakeholders in a microgrid are:
- Owner/operator - the plant, factory, building, or home that owns and operates the assets.
- System integrators - organizations the are contracted to design and build the microgrid.
- Utility operators - the local grid operating entity
- Customers - users of electric power within the microgrid.
The IIC also identifies the major components of a microgrid as follows (refer to the figure):
- Generation - an asset that can generate electric power (e.g. a solar PV array)
- Storage - an asset that store electric energy (a battery)
- Loads - the electric energy demand from the power-consuming equipment within the microgrid
- Point of Common Coupling (PCC) - the electrical connection between the microgrid and the rest of the grid
- Intelligent Director - this provides the operating plan for the microgrid, within the operational limitations of the available equipment and within the business objectives, which will depend on the cost behavior (rate structure) of grid power supply to the microgrid. Essentially this is a constrained optimizer.
- Controller - this manipulates the generation, storage and load assets to follow the plan mapped out by the director.
A few observations about this:
- As the white paper reports, the grid and especially microgrids provide a superb use case for IIoT technologies and thinking.
- The grid as a whole includes industrial, commercial and consumer segments. Residential (consumer) assets have a growing impact on the entire grid in many areas.
- As new energy technologies penetrate the consumer segment (for example rooftop solar PV, electric vehicles, and residential storage systems) residential sized microgrids will become more important and will become by far the most numerous type of microgrid.
- The paper refers to system integrators that offer “microgrid-as-service”. These types of actors have proven very important in the development of existing applications like automated demand response. Essentially these organizations aggregate and manage hundreds or thousands of small generators and then sell the aggregated behavior of all these generators into an electric power market managed by an independent system operator (ISO).
- The microgrid model needs to trivialize the task of integrating assets at very small microgrid sites, such as residences with only a rooftop solar PV system.
- The interfaces developed in the model should enable simple aggregation of microgrid assets. Why? Because this will enable third parties to aggregate and manage large numbers of small (residential) systems. My bet is that as residential generation grows, most consumers will be more than happy to outsource the operation and management of their systems to a 3rd party.
- It might make sense to add a new type of stakeholder to the model, the aggregator/operator. It also might make sense to design the model to be recursive, by adding a “microgrid” component to the model, since this would greatly simplify the task of aggregation.
There is a big opportunity here to define standards that can be used on grids worldwide. Today in North America there are a handful of ISOs and their market rules and practices are different and are only gradually becoming harmonized. Solid (and working!) microgrid standards could easily be adopted by larger grid operators to speed this harmonization.