A Laboratory Scale Test-Bed for Demonstrating and Validating Smart Grid Concepts

Abstract

Currently, power distribution network is undergoing significant and rapid transformation to a decentralised, yet integrated network with customer oriented future called smart grid. This infrastructure will be equipped with monitoring devices, control units, bi-directional communication facility between central and distributed controllers, in addition to the Distributed Generators (DGs) and energy storage elements. The comprehensive development of smart grids necessitates innovations in real-time energy resource sharing and balancing, communication network design and data processing mechanisms. The successful implementation of the state-of-the-art technologies developed for smart grid calls for its validation in real hardware before deployment in the field. This paper presents the design and implementation of a laboratory scale smart grid test-bed, which can foster the researchers to analyse and validate the developed technologies in real hardware. The proposed test-bed is also a pedagogical model for the under graduate and post graduate students for project-based learning in smart grid.