Apperley, M. (2019). Modelling fractal-structured smart microgrids: Exploring signals and protocols. In M. Negnevitsky & V. Sultan (Eds.), Proceedings of ENERGY 2019, The Ninth International Conference on Smart Grids, Green Communications and IT Energy-aware Technologies (pp. 13–17). Athens, Greece: IARIA.
Abstract
This paper discusses some of the issues surrounding the interconnection of smart microgrids, with a focus on fractal structures, their implementation, management, operation, and potential effectiveness. It builds on a basic smart microgrid model which focuses on the property of localised energy balance, in order to mitigate the dependency on legacy-grid resources to accommodate short-term (hourly) and medium term (daily to monthly) imbalance. This model provides the basis for further development to allow connecting a group of such micro-grids into a network which externally presents identical structure and characteristics, so enabling the fractal-like interconnection of these micro-grids, or groups of microgrids. Such structures simplify the interconnection, management and operation of smart microgrids, and their connection to the legacy grid. They also intrinsically enable the notion of grid-edge trading. These characteristics have the potential not just to further enable and promote the effective utilisation of distributed generation and storage, but also to simplify and rationalise future backbone grid development.
