Study of Communication Between Distributed Generation Devices in an Smart Grid Environment

The increasing demand of electricity, due to population growth in recent years has resulted in a necessary expansion of the energy matrix through alternative sources including consumer's small power generators in low or medium voltage. Thus, studies have been conducted to enter the automation in the control of these systems but has not yet been established what will be controlled and how to get the data effectively. In this microgrid scenario, one of the challenges is the automation of network among different devices such as generator controllers, smart meters, etc., in order to facilitate the required exchange of information and enable networked control. Therefore, this paper presents a simulation of a microgrid (MG) with a distributed generator (DG) remotely controlled via a wireless communication. The methodology is presented through integrated simulation of smart grids, in which the electrical system was implemented using PLECS blockset, while the wireless network was designed using the TrueTime toolbox, both emulated in Matlab Simulink. In this MG application, the use of ZigBee and WLAN wireless networks to control the active power generation of the DG is evaluated under different network parameters such as loss probability and distance between the devices. Results show that the simulation provide a solution for wireless network analysis, DG control and electrical network modeling of the in smart MG scenarios presenting the efficient network solution for MG development.