Utilizing Smart Inverter Virtual-Sensor Nodes for Enhanced Behind-the-Meter Visibility in High PV Penetration Distribution Feeders

A significant barrier to deploying Distributed Energy Resources (DER) into power systems is insufficient visibility into low-voltage grids and behind-the-meter (BTM) resources. Leveraging the existing data set from the distributed inverters, already being measured by the controller, could help gain better visibility into behind-the-meter PV generation without additional hardware costs. This paper presents a Power-Hardware-In-the-loop (PHIL) testbed to investigate the feasibility of the "virtual inverter sensing nodes" concept by utilizing commercial PV inverters and their controller and assessing the application of the existing commercial micro Phasor Measurement Units (µ PMU)" as data aggregators in the distribution feeders to improve the BTM visibility of PV generations. The analysis of the recorded data from the commercial microinverters shows the sampling rate is critical and the 10 minutes sampling interval of the existing microinverters is insufficient. The communication requirements for BTM data to be delivered from PV inverters to the data aggregator nodes for enhanced BTM visibility, are defined by implementing a low-cost communication platform. The effectiveness is demonstrated with Real-time data monitoring.