Advanced operational functionalities for a low voltage Microgrid test site

This work aims to describe the implementation of a renewable energy based Microgrid test site facility at the University of Genova (Italy) and to depict the advanced functionalities there implemented within the national supported project Smartgen. The developed advanced Distribution Management System (DMS) is based on a Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) system for the remote monitoring of a Low Voltage Microgrid composed by a photovoltaic (PV) plant, an ion-lithium energy storage system, electrical load and a weather station. The implemented DMS is embedded with advanced functionalities which provide 36 hours forecasting of the load consumption and renewable generation. The forecasted data are also used to optimally program and manage the storage device. The proposed algorithms are described and also implementation aspects are reported within the paper.