Impact of Correlated Distributed Generation on Information Aggregation in Smart Grid

Real-time control of a smart grid with renewable energy based generations requires accurate state estimates, that is typically based on measurements aggregated from smart meters. However, the amount of data/measurements increases with the scale of the physical grid, posing a significant stress on both the communication infrastructure as well as data processing control centers. This paper first investigates the effect of geographical footprint of distributed generation (DG) on the voltage states of a smart distribution system. We demonstrate that the strong coupling of the physical power system results in estimated voltage phasors exhibiting a correlation structure that allows for compressed measurements. Specifically, by exploiting principles of 1D and 2D compressed sensing, we illustrate the effectiveness of voltage estimation with significantly low number of random spatial, temporal as well as spatio-temporal power measurements. Results demonstrate the importance of accounting for correlation in information aggregation in smart grids.