(558e) Optimal Resource Expansion and Placement in Smart Grid Communications Networks

With concerns about climate change, the adoption of new renewable standards and accelerated cost reductions are driving sharp growth in renewable energy technologies. In particular, the number of distributed solar photovoltaic (PV) installations is growing rapidly. However, as distributed solar power becomes an increasing fraction of total energy generation, the electric power grid must ensure continued reliability and cost-effectiveness. The development of the Smart Grid, as a natural evolution of the electric power grid, seeks to incorporate new technologies in order to support these distributed generation sources.

New grid devices, such as synchrophasors and Smart Meters, will be built to provide the existing Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems with vital power flow information. These SCADA systems allow operators to monitor and control transmission and maintain operational efficiency. But since network deployments can involve thousands of devices, manual reconfiguration and tuning of these devices are impractical. Therefore, automatic placement and optimization of network topology is critical to providing a high-performing, reliable, secure, and scalable communication network in support of the Smart Grid evolution.

In this work, we develop a procedure to optimally place communication hardware within a distributed PV network, while taking advantage of existing communications technologies to greatly reduce costs and maintaining quality of service for consumers. We propose a mixed-integer linear programming approach for optimal placement of communication nodes to ensure communication between Photo-Voltaic (PV) inverters and transmission substations in a multi-hop network via relay nodes, aggregation points, and various ad-hoc communication systems. We also consider uncertainty in link parameters, such as packet loss, latency, and bandwidth. We show results that are robust to changes in economic considerations and future technological improvements.