Electric generation capacity is becoming more costly and continues to emit greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The United States government, California legislature and Public Utilities Commission have all communicated to the California utilities that they should embark on a plan to invest in Smart Grid Infrastructure to manage increasing distributed generation penetration, reduce greenhouse gases, improve grid reliability and power quality and assist customers in reducing their energy usage. PG&E; filed its original Smart Grid Investment plan in 2011, with its latest update occurring in October 2013. As part of the filing, PG&E; proposed funding to execute testing and a field pilot for a VoltVAR Optimization system, a distribution automation technology that automates control of feeder voltage profiles. The PG&E; VVO pilot project will assess vendor solutions, perform end-to-end testing on those solutions, design and install a field pilot and measure and validate project benefits. The scope includes installing a VVO system on approximately 12 distribution feeders to understand the risks, benefits and costs prior to proposing a potential system-wide roll out. PG&E; is conducting the first phase of the VoltVAR pilot by evaluating VVO solutions in the lab. VVO solutions vary significantly in design and execution, so evaluating this technology in the lab is critical to making a successful choice. At the same time, setting up the systems for a side by side comparison is a significant challenge. Different VVO solutions rely on different input data. Some use dynamic data from the AMI system, so we will use our test metering network for this evaluation. Other solutions are model based, and may or may not use AMI data. Finally, we have heuristic solutions that use sensor data in yet another way. Execution is another aspect of these tests, as VVO solutions make changes using different logic and different methods. We will evaluate the VVO solutions using our Distribution Test Yard, and look at how the solutions make changes to our Grid and evaluate what the impact of those changes will be. The goal of the PG&E; VoltVAR Optimization pilot is to evaluate the ability of different solutions to automatically control feeder voltage profiles, reduce customer energy usage, support the increased penetration of distributed generation and reduce utility system losses. Therefore, the lab testing must provide enough information to begin to discover how well each VVO solution meets these goals. Presenter(s): rt Anderson, Manager, Smart Grid Lab, PG&E; Presentation documents are available at Penn State's Smart Grid Educational Webinar Series Archive at https://smartenergyacademy.psu.edu/gridstar/webinar-series-archive. You can also browse the rest of the archives there, or by using the Smart Grid Educational Webinar Series playlist on YouTube. Originally delivered on February 27, 2014. Dr. Erfan Ibrahim, Founder & CEO of The Bit Bazaar LLC is offering these monthly seminars as a public service to bridge the knowledge gap in the industry and inspire a new generation of students, researchers, engineers, and policy experts to understand the technical, policy and business requirements to enable Smart Grids and develop the skill set to design, build and manage the infrastructure in a commercially viable way. The Smart Grid Educational series seminars are bringing world-class experts in the field to educate the industry on critical issues and create a forum for interaction to solve complex problems in this field. These forums also allow national labs and academia to showcase their research work to the nation and internationally to attract new funding, new faculty, new students and new ideas for curriculum development. It is also promoting cutting edge technologies from vendors, world class experts, and sound engineering, business process and policy principles leading to economic growth, job creation, and social benefit. You can view more webinars at Penn State's Smart Grid Educational Webinar Series Archive at https://smartenergyacademy.psu.edu/gridstar/webinar-series-archive or by using the Smart Grid Educational Webinar Series playlist on YouTube.

• published: 31 Oct 2014
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