EDGE-IOT ASSISTED ACTIVE GRID MANAGEMENT FOR REAL-TIME CONTROL OF DER-RICH DISTRIBUTION NETWORKS – ENERGY POLICY

Povzetek

The increasing proliferation of distributed energy resources (DERs) requires active grid management (AGM) solutions which allow real-time monitoring, analytics and decentralized control. Nevertheless, classical centralized AGM architectures are subject to high communication latencies, low scalability and slow reaction in presence of dynamic grid perturbations, especially for distribution networks with large penetration of DERs. As a way forward, this paper introduces an edge–IoT active grid management framework that leverages edge computing and cloud-based coordination for low-latency decision making and resilient grid operation. The processing of high-resolution field readings at the edge is envisioned by the architecture to enable quick event detection and local control. Subsystem-specific optimization, prediction, and visualization are handled by individual services at the cloud level. Experimental results show significant performance gains including a 75% reduction in voltage variation (± 8% to ±1.25%) while achieving over 90% reduction in the fault-finding time (to <2 s). Results demonstrate that the incorporation of edge intelligence and coordinated cloud control leads to considerable reliability, operational efficiency and renewable energy integration improvement on the grid, offering a promising path towards data-driven autonomous distribution networks.