Technologies for Interoperability in Microgrids for Energy Access

Photovoltaic (PV) microgrids have been one of the technological solutions to the lack of energy access in last-mile communities. As PV technology gains popularity, more industry players enter the electricity market, resulting in interoperability issues. Interoperability is an important feature of an electricity system as it improves system reliability. It is also essential for microgrid scalability as it enables adaptable integration with one another, other decentralized solutions, or with the centralized grid. The purpose of this paper is to examine the current state of technology for PV microgrid interoperability. We discovered that the literature on interoperability in the context of microgrids is primarily limited to information and communication technologies. We classified the identified technologies into a five-layer microgrid architecture.