Methods and Concepts for Designing and Validating Smart Grid Systems

Energy efficiency and low-carbon technologies are key contributors to curtailing the emission of greenhouse gases that continue to cause global warming. The efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions also strongly affect electrical power systems. Renewable sources, storage systems, and flexible loads provide new system controls, but power system operators and utilities have to deal with their fluctuating nature, limited storage capabilities, and typically higher infrastructure complexity with a growing number of heterogeneous components. In addition to the technological change of new components, the liberalization of energy markets and new regulatory rules bring contextual change that necessitates the restructuring of the design and operation of future energy systems. Sophisticated component design methods, intelligent information and communication architectures, automation and control concepts, new and advanced markets, as well as proper standards are necessary in order to manage the higher complexity of such intelligent power systems that form smart grids.

Due to the considerably higher complexity of such cyber-physical energy systems, constituting the power system, automation, protection, information and communication technology (ICT), and system services, it is expected that the design and validation of smart-grid configurations will play a major role in future technology and system developments. However, an integrated approach for the design and evaluation of smart-grid configurations incorporating these diverse constituent parts remains evasive. The currently available validation approaches focus mainly on component-oriented methods. In order to guarantee a sustainable, affordable, and secure supply of electricity through the transition to a future smart grid with considerably higher complexity and innovation, new design, validation, and testing methods appropriate for cyber-physical systems are required. Therefore, this book summarizes recent research results and developments related to the design and validation of smart grid systems.