5th Webinar from Webinar Series

Title: ICT Requirements and Challenges for Provision of Grid Services from Renewable Generation Plants
Speaker: Kamal Shahid

Kamal Shahid received his M.Sc. in Computer Engineering (Communication) in 2012 from Centre for Advanced Studies in Engineering (CASE), Islamabad, Pakistan. He joined the Department of Electrical Engineering, University of the Punjab in 2012 as a Lecturer. In 2015, he joined the Department of Electronic Systems (Wireless Communication Network Section), Aalborg University, Denmark as a PhD fellow, followed by the Post-Doctoral fellowship in the same department. Dr. Kamal’s research focuses on the role of communication networks in smart grid scenarios and the impact of networks on remote access to dynamic data of the distribution/collection of information. He has been working on defining communication requirements and developing communication strategies to cater the huge penetration of renewable energy sources (especially wind power and solar PV) in the power grid. As a part of developing a lab for smart grids implementation and testing, his work also focuses on the implementation of IEC-61850 based communication standard, considering both time-critical as well as non-time-critical applications via GOOSE and MMS, respectively. Currently, he is a part of a Danish as well as a European Union research project related to Smart Grids.

Abstract

The penetration of renewable energy into the electricity supply mix necessitates the traditional power grid to become more resilient, reliable and efficient. One way of ensuring this is to require renewable power plants to have similar regulating properties as conventional power plants and to coordinate their grid support services (GSS) as well. Among other requirements, the coordination of GSS will highly depend on the communication between renewable plants and system operators’ control rooms, thereby imposing high responsibility on the under lying communication infrastructure. Despite such a widespread deployment, it is still neither completely known which communication technology solutions are currently in use, nor it is clear which of these technologies best fit to access and control these renewable plants in future. This is because of varying network requirements for different smart grid applications – in terms of data payloads, sampling rates, latency and reliability. This talk will briefly highlight the role of different communication architectures for controlling renewable power plants in the future power grid, including the communication network technologies, requirements, and research challenges along with two use cases.

Link of Recorded webinar

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