Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
1, 2005
Summary: In modern distribution grids, more distributed generation technologies emerge. The Key words:
most far-going implementations are ‘energy islands’ with a high degree of autonomy from the distributed genera-
central grid. This paper considers different technological barriers that emerge with increasing tion,
penetration of such systems: power quality, control problems, safety issues, environmental as- power quality,
pects, the availability of primary energy resources and economic aspects. energy storage,
microgrid,
grid stability
1. INTRODUCTION leave open the possibility to better match sup-
ply and demand accounting for the difficult to
1.1. Distributed Generation technology control generation at different time scales. In
this manner, an enhanced power quality and
The latest years many technologies known reliability can be achieved. DG and storage to-
as Distributed Generation (DG) equipment gether form the core of future Distributed Po-
have become available, for instance building- wer systems.
integrated photovoltaic systems, wind turbines, Though, to achieve a good match between
fuel-cells, small-scale gas turbine based CHP storage-assisted generation and consumption,
(combined heat and power generation) units the load should preferably also be somehow
and so on. These appliances have in common controlled in an intelligent way in order to save
that they produce electricity from a locally ava- or shift electricity consumption. Therefore,
ilable energy source, which can be renewable some consider loads as a sort of Distributed
energy (RE). The amount of energy converted Resource that can be used to better employ
is relatively small compared to the ratings en- locally available power.
countered in large centrally distpached power All of these developments were possible due
plants. They are situated close to the electrici- to the evolution in digitally controlled power
ty consumers, and may even be integrated in electronics, forming the grid interface of the
their installations, leading to the sometimes Distributed Power system elements, both ge-
used synonym Embedded Generation. neration and storage, and many loads. The per-
The electricity produced by such DG units formance of such systems could even be incre-
has its own particular characteristics, often due ased when a suitable communication infrastruc-
to the availability of the primary source or dri- ture is present.
ving factor: e.g. wind, sun, heat demand in a Hence, it is to be expected that a larger part
CHP application. This makes the supply of the of the electrical energy is to be produced, con-
electrical energy less guaranteed, but on the sumed and managed locally in a sort Energy
other hand environmentally friendly resources Island or microgrid and some people are even
can be employed. tempted to ask whether a backbone power grid
In general it is hard to tell where the limit of is still required. Behind this evolution many
DG technology is situated. Its definition is he- driving factors are present, such as the will to
avily debated, but in general most people un- employ more renewable energy sources (the
derstand it as electricity generation systems of European goal is to go from the 6% level of
small to moderate size (less than a few MW), usu- 1995 to 12% by 2010) or local energetic oppor-
ally implemented in the electricity distribution tunities such as waste heat. This has to be
system and not necessarily owned nor controlled considered in a society not eager to expand the
by utilities. As such large wind farms are gene- power system, but still with increasing demand.
rally not understood as DG. For this and other reasons, it is not expected
that the security and quality of supply will stay
1.2. Complementary technologies at the level of the past, certainly the extreme
DG power generation technology is comple- high levels of security of supply known in con-
mented by energy storage technologies such tinental Europe (UCTE zone) will come under
as advanced battery types, supercapacitors, pressure. Some dream of doing it on their own
superconducting coils, and flywheels. They in an Energy Island.