Industrial Internet Consortium Announces Microgrid Testbed Results and Publishes Whitepaper

Author photo: Chantal Polsonetti
ByChantal Polsonetti
Category:
Company and Product News

The Industrial Internet Consortium  (IIC) announced publication of its Synchronized and Business-Ready Microgrid whitepaper.  IIC members Real-Time Innovations (RTI) and Wipro Limited wrote the whitepaper based on findings from the IIC Communications & Control Testbed for Microgrid Applications (Microgrid Testbed), which also includes IIC members Cisco and National Instruments.

Traditional central-station power grids operate on 15-minute output update cycles that force operators to over-generate power to compensate for potential blackouts, for example, when solar arrays lose the sun, or unexpected new power demands on the grid, such as when a neighborhood plugs in several electric vehicles.  The IIC Microgrid Testbed began in 2015 with a goal to introduce the flexibility of real-time analytics and control to increase efficiencies in this legacy process, ensuring that power is generated more accurately and reliably.  

This Microgrid Testbed whitepaper offers some of the findings from this testbed, including:

  • The ability to connect an active 100 percent renewable energy-based microgrid back to the main power grid
  • Application and device independence through the support of the Open Field Message Bus (OpenFMB) architecture standard
  • Visualization, control and analytics to support efficient operations
  • Integration with third party data and support of varying business models

The microgrid testbed uses time-sensitive networking (TSN), the latest real-time Ethernet network, between the inverter nodes to provide sub-millisecond synchronized measurement of phase, frequency and voltage. This enables the frequency, voltage and phase angle of each renewable energy source in the microgrid to be synchronized and controlled in real time, enhancing the operation of the microgrid and facilitating the enhanced penetration of distributed energy resources (DERs). The testbed uses a standards-based approach, using the Data Distribution Service (DDS) standard from The Object Management Group to securely collect data from field devices, and the OpenFMB standard from the North American Energy Standards Board to future proof designs for grid operators.

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