Scalability of Smart Grid Protocols: Protocols and Their Simulative Evaluation for Massively Distributed DERs

Today, the whole energy sector is going to enter a phase of far-reaching revolution. The legacy power generation and transmission concept is converting to a massively distributed energy generation landscape integrating an extensive number of variable and small renewable energy resources such as biomass or PV installations with all their challenging effects on the energy grid. New stakeholders (e.g. energy resource aggregators), more flexibility for the consumers (energy market place), and totally new concepts (loading of e-Cars, usage of e-Cars as flexible power storage) have to be respected. Innovative monitoring and control concepts are required to operate these distributed energy resources in a reliable and safe way. This paper describes the principles for an efficient management of a massively distributed energy system based on small and variable energy resources. For evaluation purposes of this approach a newly developed coupled energy grid communication network simulator is introduced with which large scale aspects of the new ICT management frame¬works can be studied in a smart grid environment.