Power Electronics for Renewable Energy Systems, Transportation and Industrial Applications

Chapter 3An Overview on Distributed Generation and Smart Grid Concepts and Technologies

Concettina Buccella¹, Carlo Cecati¹ and Haitham Abu-Rub²

¹ Department of Information Engineering, Computer Science and Mathematics, University of L'Aquila, and DigiPower Ltd. L'Aquila, Italy

² Electrical and Computer Engineering, Texas A&M University at Qatar, Doha, Qatar

3.1 Introduction

The existing power grid can be considered as a hierarchical system where power plants are at the top of the chain and loads are at the bottom, resulting in a unidirectional electrical pipeline managed with limited information about the exchange among sources and end points.

This situation has severe drawbacks, including the following:

• The system is sensitive to voltage and frequency instabilities as well as to power security issues caused by load variations and dynamic network reconfigurations.
• The implementation of demand side management strategies, which would be very useful for reducing the risk of failures and blackouts and for increasing system efficiency, is not allowed, moreover.
• It is not suitable for the integration of renewable energy.

During the last decade, the electrical energy market has been characterized by a growing demand for energy and two important innovations: the quick growth and massive diffusion of renewable energy systems (RESs) and the subsequent rapid development of distributed generation (DG) systems and smart grids (SGs) [1–5]. Conventional unidirectional power systems consisting ...