Digital Grid: Communicative electrical grids of the future

Abstract

Abstract-To support a high penetration of intermittent solar and wind power generation, many regions are planning to add new high capacity transmission lines. These additional transmission lines strengthen grid synchronization, but will also increase the grid's short circuit capacity, and furthermore will be very costly. With a highly interconnected grid and variable renewable generation, a small grid failure can easily start cascading outages, resulting in large scale blackout. We introduce the "digital grid," where large synchronous grids are divided into smaller segmented grids which are connected asynchronously, via multileg IP addressed ac/dc/ac converters called digital grid routers. These routers communicate with each other and send power among the segmented grids through existing transmission lines, which have been repurposed as digital grid transmission lines. The digital grid can accept high penetrations of renewable power, prevent cascading outages, accommodate identifiable tagged electricity flows, record those transactions, and trade electricity as a commodity.

Energy Internet: The business perspective

“…Based on the concept of the Internet of Energy, 6 demonstration projects have been carried out in Germany. In Japan, the concept of Digital Grid was first proposed in 2011 [26]. The objectives of Japan's Digital Grid were reducing the cascading failures in large areas and realizing the high penetration of renewable energy by splitting the synchronized large power grid into several asynchronous sub power grids.…”

DC Local Power Distribution with microgrids and nanogrids

“…The AC utility grid is necessarily a tightly coupled unitary system. LPD enables loose coupling, which has been noted to be advantageous [11] [14].…”

“…Many papers have made the grid/Internet analogy, though have drawn diverse conclusions from it. Some proposals have included the notion of routing electricity [11] [12]. Routing data packets makes sense because they are all different.…”

Testbed evaluations of a controlled-delivery power grid

“…Close monitoring of the grid's performance may be achieved by deploying (auxiliary) sensing data networks [5]- [14]. At the same time, ensuring working paths, which carry energy all the time, translates into additional management complexity [12], [15]. These works show the adoption of a controlled distribution of power that can be seamlessly coupled with grid monitoring as an objective.…”

“…Approaches to verify users identification before the start of energy transmission in point-to-point communications have been also considered [12]. These approaches, however, require one-toone connection and therefore, are unscalable to large number of users.…”