• Energy Research

Smart meters (SM) generate critical data that provides real-time insights into energy consumption, grid performance, and load management, which are essential for improving grid reliability, energy efficiency, and renewable energy integration. However, achieving effective communication between smart meters and the control center remains a challenge due to limitations in Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI), including communication delays, metering technology constraints, and restricted data storage and processing capabilities. These limitations hinder the precision and timeliness of real-time data delivery, negatively impacting the efficiency of energy management and grid operations. While existing research predominantly focuses on optimizing communication network algorithms, the critical issue of comprehensive SM data scheduling has received limited attention. Moreover, current methods often fail to account for the complexity of communication networks and the dynamic nature of information flow. To address this gap, this paper introduces a novel method for scheduling SM data access by leveraging real-time data assessment and analysis. A quality metric termed mismatch probability evaluates data quality, and the Hungarian algorithm is employed to optimize meter scheduling. The proposed method is validated using real-world data from a Danish grid, demonstrating significant improvements in information quality for real-time monitoring compared to heuristic-based scheduling approaches.

Renewable energy sources (RES) such as solar and wind has emerged as the fastest growing energy sources. The growth of their deployment in the power sector leads to several challenges, for example, voltage violation, power quality issues, power losses etc. One of the several strategies to overcome the voltage violation problem is the provision of reactive power from the PV inverters. Local controller of the photo voltaic (PV) inverters coordinates with the coordinated controller to generate the reactive power. The coordinated controller performs its function based on the information obtained from the whole grid via underlying communication network. This imposes a high responsibility over the communication network infrastructure in order to ensure a reliable and stable voltage control in distribution grids (DGs). This paper, therefore, analyses the impact of communication networks on the voltage quality control supported by the reactive power generation of PV plants in DGs. Further, a voltage coordination scenario is presented based on an actual grid by a local distribution system operator (DSO) in Denmark. This paper evaluated the network performance in terms of network delays in the signal, being transferred between the smart meters of the grid and coordinated controller.