Ricerc@Sapienza

The paper presents a feasibility study regarding the ability of an existing rural microgrid to supply an islanded portion of the MV distribution network. The microgrid is currently off-grid, but in the near future will be connected to the MV distribution grid. Based on load and generation measurements in a six-month period, a statistical analysis is carried out with the aim to check the ability of the microgrid to guarantee such a service whenever requested.

The innovation proposed by modern grid paradigms forces to create cutting-edge solutions for managing and integrating software microgrid technologies, as well as hardware ones. In this view, the possibility of exploiting the flexibility of the smart actors of the power system is a key aspect for designing both technical and economic smart grid scenarios in a wide range of energy contexts. In this paper, a smart ICT platform for the management of the flexibility provided by the actors of a microgrid is proposed.

Distributed Generation (DG) brought new challenges for protection engineers since standard relay settings of traditional system may no longer function properly under increasing presence of DG. The extreme case is coordination loss between primary and backup relays. The directional overcurrent relay (DOCR) which is the most implemented protective device in the electrical network also suffers performance degradation in presence of DG.