Power System Balancing Using FRIENDS

This paper proposes a new concept named Flexible, Reliable and Intelligent ENergy Delivery System (FRIENDS) as a future power distribution system. In FRIENDS, new facilities called Quality Control Centers (QCCs), which consists of Voltage Control type Inverters, Distributed Generators (DGs), Energy Storage Systems (ESSs), etc., are installed between distribution substation and customers. By controlling and operating those inverters and DGs in QCCs adequately, balancing the supply and demand can be realized. Particularly, when the power supply from the transmission network is interrupted, isolated local network which consists of some QCCs are composed in order to realize uninterruptible power supply. In the isolated network, the DGs and ESSs in QCCs are employed as backup generators. This paper proposes a distributed and autonomous method for balancing the power system supply and demand during interruption period. This paper also investigates the effectiveness of the proposed method through computational simulations using MATLAB and LabVIEW. The results obtained using our hardware with MATLAB and LabVIEW were also compared with that of the one obtained using PSCAD.