ICT Requirements and Challenges for Provision of Grid Services from Renewable Generation Plants

The penetration of renewable energy into the electricity supply mix necessitates the traditional power grid to become more resilient, reliable and efficient. One way of ensuring this is to require renewable power plants to have similar regulating properties as conventional power plants and to coordinate their grid support services (GSS) as well. Among other requirements, the coordination of GSS will highly depend on the communication between renewable plants and system operators’ control rooms, thereby imposing high responsibility on the under lying communication infrastructure. Despite such a widespread deployment, it is still neither completely known which communication technology solutions are currently in use, nor it is clear which of these technologies best fit to access and control these renewable plants in future. This is because of varying communication requirements for different GSS applications – in terms of data payloads, sampling rates, latency and reliability. Therefore, this paper presents a brief survey on the control and communication architectures for controlling renewable power plants in the future power grid, including the communication network technologies, requirements, and research challenges. To help identifying research problems in the continued studies, this paper attempts to ascertain how the underlying protocols in a communication stack influence timely and reliable communication in the said scenario.