Enhancing Responsiveness and Resilience with Distributed Applications in the Grid

Variability in electric power systems is increasing, resulting in a need for new approaches in control. The greater variability originates from distributed energy resources and increasing demand for personalized energy choice from customers at the grid edge. This issue is further accentuated in rural communities that are seeing an increasing interest in deploying resilient microgrids. Electricity distribution systems incorporate increasing numbers of intelligent end devices, automated switchgear, and sensing and measurement devices, which are providing more visibility and potential control at the grid edge. Traditional distribution system planning and operations techniques must evolve to manage the new complexity while continuing to deliver safe, reliable, and cost-effective energy. New technologies are enabling new capabilities at the grid edge to respond to these needs. Distributed applications can deploy intelligence across the distribution grid with peer-to-peer communications and a shared data context for their local environment. These applications can cooperate to quickly respond to changing grid conditions. This enables a layered coordination framework that spans the centralized advanced distribution management system functions with wide-area visibility of the new distributed applications that are running at intelligent devices and meters throughout the distribution system. This paper describes an open-architecture, open-source system approach for large scale integration of devices and intelligence at the grid edge.