Evaluation and test environment for automation concepts in Smart Grids applications

The continuous growth of electric energy consumption is nowadays an irresistible fact. To stop this process renewable energy resources have to be used on a larger scale. Distributed renewable generation, which is a result of this trend, lead to various problems for the existing power grid which has not been designed to transport the current in both directions. With increasing and large numbers of distributed renewable energy resources it is to be feared that the power grid quality can only be hardly maintained. The introduction of Smart Grids technology is a promising approach to overcome such shortcomings. For developing the Smart Grids with distributed power generation a suitable laboratory environment is often necessary to test new Smart Grid network components and to validate new concepts. Therefore, the main purpose of this work is to define a suitable evaluation environment for developing, testing and validating automation, control and communication concepts in Smart Grids applications which fulfils the main requirements of a flexible, scalable, portable and hardware-independent system.