Towards more resilient electrical networks in urban areas

The requirement of system decarbonisation fixed by the EU 2050 plan is leading to an increased establishment of renewable energy sources. Additionally, the disruption of power electronics and ICT technologies has played a... [ view full abstract ]

The requirement of system decarbonisation fixed by the EU 2050 plan is leading to an increased establishment of renewable energy sources. Additionally, the disruption of power electronics and ICT technologies has played a decisive role towards a novel distribution electric grid allowing new monitoring, operation and control. In parallel to the energetic transition, an increasing occurrence of extreme weather events and a reinforced concern on climate change leads to the concept of resilience, which is the capacity to adapt and recover from disruptive events in a coordinated procedure.

The present study aims at analysing the effects of integrating renewable distributed generation at a distribution level in order to increase distribution grid resilience as well as to ensure and secure power supply to the system. At a city level, if an outage occurs in the main grid, and there are no redundancies in the system, several customers can be left unsupplied. Therefore, in the present study it is also interesting to explore future Distributed Energy Resources (DER) penetration scenarios with current electrical models for investigating new electrical concepts such as microgrid (MG) clusterization.

With novel controllable technologies and during a failure event, the on-outaged areas are able to disconnect from the main grid, creating isolated MGs which can work autonomously.  MGs operate independently from each other and due to the variability of energy inputs and the lack of current technological adaptation, such power islands are prone to instabilities. [JLD1] Sudden unbalances between generation and consumption lead to the idea of clustering several MGs in order to increase the system stability. Nowadays, MG clusterization is still at an early research state, however, with the increasing concern on decarbonisation, the scenario of decentralised and distributed power systems is gaining force.