Renewable Energies and Smartgrids
António Vidigal
EDP Inovação
Lisbon, Portugal
I have been working long enough with power utilities to
know that this industry has among its major values reliability
and security of supply, and that there is little to improve in
these areas; this has been achieved through years of
incremental innovations, which can be traced back to Edison
and Tesla.
This excellence has been recognized to the point that power
systems have been voted the top engineering achievement of
the 20th century, by the American National Academy of
Engineering.
However, there is an unavoidable law of life that implies
that everything has eventually to change. As we move into the
21st century we have to recognize that the distribution systems
concepts are approaching their limits. The major reason for
this, being the need to incorporate an ever increasing amount of
renewable sources - such as wind and solar - as well as
distributed generation.
Electric distribution systems are still being designed, today,
in an hierarchical model similar to what was the practice in
Computer Networks during the 70’s, and it is widely
recognized that they will have to evolve to a “Energy Web”
model, bringing to energy distribution, some of the attributes of
the Internet. What is needed is more flexibility, implementing
features like “plug-and-play” and “peer-to-peer” operation,
which we have learned to take for granted in the Internet. This
is the promise that smartgrids will have to deliver.
Nowhere is the need for smartgrids more apparent than in
electric mobility. In fact, the electrical car will represent for the
distribution network a new kind of load with a stochastic
behavior in time and space.
An overload of the power system may occur due to the
simultaneous charging of vehicles. Two kinds of situations
may occur: at macroscopic level, excessive demand may imply
excessive usage of generation. As an example, if 1 million
electric vehicles are connected to low voltage 16 A circuits , in
the same 15 minute interval, the system total generation with
have to increase by 3.700 MW in a short time, and this may
not be feasible. Of course such a problem will only happen at
medium/ long term, when the penetration of electric vehicles
becomes relevant, but it is fundamental to start designing
systems in such a way that they can cope with these situations
when they will eventually occur.
It is at distribution level, that problems may arise sooner. A
distribution transformer feeding 200 residential customers can
easily be overloaded by a large number of electric vehicles
simultaneously charging in that area.
Now, if we bring smartgrids into the equation, we may
have more clever solutions than just oversizing generation,
transmission and distribution; it is better, from the economic
point of view, to adopt "smart charging" technology, which
will throttle the power required by each vehicle, according to
the availability of the power system.
But electric vehicles and the smartgrids may, in the future,
become strong enablers of the introduction of large amounts
of renewable energy into the systems, by allowing their
batteries to be used as distributed storage/regulation of the
volatile renewable energy .
It would be like this: electric vehicles would be equipped
with a plug for connecting to the Mains and another to connect
to the Net. Whenever we will park our cars at night, at home,
we will connect both plugs, and will connect them again, in
the morning, when we park at our office’s garage.
While parked the car will keep receiving information about
the incremental costs of energy. They will store energy in
batteries when it is cheap as there is a lot of wind and solar
energy available, and will sell back the energy when the price
is high enough, due to the scarcity of production. An energy
reserve, will overcourse be kept, in order to enable us to
continue using the car for our day to day needs. Parked in the
garage, cars will, in the future, help pay themselves by
arbitrating on the price of energy.
This is known as "V2G - Vehicle to Grid", and although
most technologies needed are available, a huge effort on
standards will have to be made and distribution networks
design concepts will have to be re-thought, bringing into the
equation smartgrids, to provide “peer-to-peer” decentralized
operation.
I believe power systems are now at the inflection point
where ITC was 15 years ago, and this will lead to new
opportunities for both “start-ups” and large corporations. We
view that an important part of our mission, at EDP Inovação, is
to help leverage these opportunities.