Joint Study of Power System and Communication Network in FINSENY and FINESCE Projects
ACS has been involved in the EU projects FINSENY (Future Internet for Smart ENergY) and its follow-up phase II project named FINESCE (Future INtErnet for Smart Utility ServiCEs) since 2011. In the FINSENY project, one of the activities of ACS was an experimentation effort in support of demonstrating the impact of communication disturbances on the power systems operation. In the FINESCE project, ACS is taking a step forward by including a far more complete set of actors into consideration and integrating as many real actors as possible into the real-time simulation.
Under the framework of the European Commission Future Internet Public-Private Partnership (FI-PPP) program, the FINSENY project targeted the energy domain by defining of a set of relevant use cases for future energy systems and their requirements on ICT technologies. As part of its con- tributions to FINSENY, ACS developed a real-time simulation platform capable of supporting the joint analysis of power systems and communication networks in a realistic man- ner. The platform is composed of two main tools, namely Real-Time Digital Simulator (RTDS) and Wide Area Network emulator (WANem). RTDS, which is a state-of-the-art power system analysis tool, allows for a dynamic, time domain, and real-time simulation of the test case system under study. WANem, which is an open-source network emulator, is employed to create predefined network disturbances, such as delay, jitter, packet loss, and limited bandwidth, thus affec- ting the stream of measurement data and control signals of the simulated power system. Using these tools, the impact of communication disturbances on the performance of an adaptive under-frequency load shedding (UFLS) scheme, adopted as case study, was tested. This scheme was chosen as an exemplary time-critical application in power system. Charging Electric vehicles (EV) were considered as the loads to be shed in first place. The tests were performed on the IEEE 39 bus system.
In the FINESCE project, which includes several field trials involving use of FI components called Generic Enablers, ACS is expanding the simulation setup developed in FINSENY. This expansion consists of including several actors which were not considered before. These new players are the EV charge optimization system, implemented at Waterford In- stitute of Technology (WIT), the LTE network, planned bet- ween ACS laboratory and Ericsson Eurolab Deutschland in Aachen, and the DSO management system, developed and located at ACS. This new setup will be used for testing the newly developed algorithms before field implementation and then scaling up the results of e-mobility field tests.