Traditionally, distribution network monitoring has been focused on primary substations (i.e., high voltage/medium voltage level), whereas low voltage (LV) network has not been monitored at all. With rapid growth and penetration of distributed energy resources in LV grids, there is growing interest in extending the real-time monitoring to LV level. The framework program FP7 European Project INTEGRIS proposes an integrated real-time LV network monitoring solution and implements it in a cost-efficient way. This solution integrates smart metering data with secondary substation measurements to get a more accurate and real-time view about LV grid, uses "decentralized" distribution management architecture to optimize data flow, and uses International Electrotechnical Commission 61850 Standardbased interfaces to improve interoperability. This paper focuses on information and communications technology perspective, explains the implementation details of this monitoring solution, and presents its functionality/performance testing results from two distribution system operator field trials and from real-time digital simulator laboratory.
The paper proposes a concept and architecture for distributed low voltage network management. Active distribution network concept is capable of real-time monitoring of whole grid and it may utilize the flexibility of distributed energy resources to enhance the hosting capacity of low voltage networks. The proposed architecture creates a bridge between fully centralized automation systems like SCADA and distributed system consisting of secondary substation automation and smart metering. In this way the proposed system extends the existing automation system to low voltage networks. It may also provide required real-time visibility and operational management to low voltage network without overloading the centralized automation system. The system has been designed for multiple low voltage network use cases like network monitoring, congestion management and fault management.
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