IEEE Power & Energy Magazine - May/June 2017 - 42

IDE4L was a three-year demonstration project
(from September 2013 through October 2016) in Europe
with a total budget of €8 million.
generation (DG), demand, response, and storage. The concept of a commercial aggregator offering flexibility services
is also integrated in an ANM.
The boundary of the project comprises medium-voltage
(MV) and low-voltage (LV) networks. The clean and reliable
energy of the future requires a new kind of electric infrastructure capable of integrating and exploiting DERs. The
large-scale penetration of RESs in MV (and increasingly in
LV) networks and new type of loads such as heat pumps
and, more pervasively in future, electric vehicles (EVs) are
expected to adversely affect the operation of existing distribution networks. The integration of DERs requires power
distribution grids to evolve into more dynamic and complex structures.
IDE4L was a three-year demonstration project (from
September 2013 through October 2016) in Europe with
a total budget of €8 million; funding was received from
the European Union Seventh Framework Program FP7SMARTCITIES-2013 under grant 608860 IDE4L-Ideal
Grid for All. New functionalities for the active grid, fit
for automation solutions, have been developed and demonstrated in laboratories and real field conditions for three
distribution system operators (DSOs): Unareti Spa (UNR),
Italy; Union Fenosa Distribution SA (UFD), Spain; and
Østkraft A/S (OST), Denmark. Field demonstration areas
consisted of three LV and two MV networks in different
countries. The coordinator of the project was Tampere University of Technology, Finland (TUT). Other partners were
Catalonia Institute for Renewable Energy, Spain; Danish
Energy, Denmark; Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan, Sweden;
RWTH Aachen University, Germany (RWTH); Schneider
Electric SA, Spain (SCH); Technical University of Denmark; and University Carlos III de Madrid, Spain.

Main Objectives of IDE4L
The objective of the IDE4L project was to develop and demonstrate the next generation of active distribution networks
that will fully comply with the new sustainable and energyefficient electricity frameworks. Project partners are designing and developing a next-generation distribution automation
architecture that enables flexibility services from DERs and
aggregators. ANM is based on new monitoring, control, and
network-planning functionalities, which were also developed and demonstrated in laboratories and on live distribution networks.
Distribution network automation includes the whole
chain of electricity network management starting from the
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ieee power & energy magazine

control center information systems through to substation au tomation, secondary substation automation, and, finally,
customer interface (smart meters and home energy management systems). The automation concept revolves around three
design points:
✔ hierarchical control architecture in distribution network automation
✔ virtualization and aggregation of DERs via an
aggregator
✔ the large-scale utilization of DERs in network
management.
A next-generation hierarchical and decentralized architecture for distribution automation has been designed and
field tested in compliance with international standards, in
particular International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC)
61850, Device Language Message Specification/Companion
Specification for Energy Metering (DLMS/COSEM) (IEC
62056), and the Common Information Model (CIM) (IEC
61970 and IEC 61968). This automation enables real-time
monitoring and control of the MV and LV grids and the
trading of flexibility services offered by DERs through
aggregators. Aggregators will offer flexibility services for
a flexibility market, and grid companies may validate submitted offers and purchase flexibility services to avoid network constraints.

Working Methodologies
The architecture was designed based on the smart grid
architecture model (SGAM) and semantic models of the
components. About 30 cases of ANM have been used to
define the model, and the description of the architecture
is able to include additional use cases or to implement
it in the form of alternative components, communication
media or protocols, and information exchange methods
and protocols.
Installing a complex automation system in a real operating environment is not a trivial task, especially if the
target environment provides the electricity distribution
grid as a public service. The leap from the design and
development stage of single "bricks" of the architecture to
the real testing of a subset of the overall system, needed to
run a use case, is quite large. For this reason, an intermediate integration step was used where pairs of system components were tested together to validate their interaction
before stacking many of them together. This intermediate
step is called the integration lab because its main focus is
on integration.
may/june 2017

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Power & Energy Magazine - May/June 2017