IEEE Power & Energy Magazine - Grid Edge 2023 - 4

Innocent Kamwa
Bottom-Up Support:
Grid-Edge Technology
T
4
THE RISE OF A LARGE NUMBER
of technologies located at the edge of
the grid (at the lowest voltage level of
the distribution network) provides new
bottom-up support capabilities for optimizing
the operation of the distribution
network and the transmission network.
Grid-edge technologies can leverage
consumer-side flexibility to meet
the needs of the energy system, help
mitigate environmental issues, reduce
energy transportation and capacity reserve
costs, improve grid stability, and
delay network upgrades, among other
things. Effective coordination and integration
between these technologies and
the grid are vital to realizing their full
potential. It relies not only on technologies
for management, control, and market
coordination but may also require
the support of new energy grid architectures.
Moreover, uniform technical
standards and practical experience are
also essential.
With balanced coverage by region,
this issue from IEEE Power & Energy
Magazine features six top annual
articles from 2015 to 2020 and one
new, focusing on concerns associated
with grid-edge technology. The topics
cover a broad range of areas in gridedge
technology with transactive energy,
batteries, electric vehicles, gridforming
inverters, distributed energy
resources, and mobile energy storage
systems.
We have one original paper, submitted
for this special expressly, and
six papers reprinted from the IEEE
PEM library. The selection methodology
of the reprints is straightforward:
from 2015 to 2020, we picked
In This Issue
The first article, by Thomas Stetz, Jan von Appen, Fabian
Niedermeyer, Gunter Scheibner, Roman Sikora, and Martin
Braun from Germany, provides a system-level overview
of the current " hot " topics regarding photovoltaic (PV) grid
integration in Germany and discusses various upcoming
R&D challenges for future high-PV-penetration scenarios.
PV systems are already the major source of electricity
(in terms of capacity) in Germany. The authors first discuss
ways that intelligent PV storage management systems could
increase the value of PV systems to their owners at the
household level. And then, they present PV grid integration
issues from a distribution system perspective, including the
value of advanced inverter functions, as well as the future
role of distribution system operators. At last, the authors
highlight the impact of bulk PV generation on the operation
and operational planning of transmission systems.
ieee power & energy magazine
the most popular grid-edge technology
paper in each year, as measured
by both citations and downloads in
IEEE explorer. Interestingly, these top
grid edge papers often turned out to
be in the top five most popular IEEE
PEM papers across the board, with
authorships spread around the globe
and a satisfactory gender balance.
This finding confirms that the interest
for Grid Edge Technologies, which
sparked-up in early 2010s, has only
grown over time since then, in all energy
professional circles, paralleling
the rising popularity of the " deep decarbonization
through electrification "
paradigm. Time has come to have an
IEEE conference fully dedicated to
this forefront innovation that is transforming
the electric power industry in
many ways.
The second article, by Koen Kok and Steve Widergren,
points out that the big challenge for the smart grid is how
to coordinate an ever-growing number of intelligent devices,
each with their own objectives and value perspectives,
into a resilient, secure, and efficient system that balances
the trade-offs among the objectives of the many participants
and has the flexibility to evolve with the changing
mix of resources over time. This frames the opportunity
for introducing transactive energy (TE) concepts across the
entire infrastructure and specifically into the distributionlevel
of the electricity grid.
The authors focus primarily on the application of TE as
a scalable coordination approach to electricity distribution
systems operations by reviewing and contrasting the
way a TE system works and its advantages with competing
(Continued)
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IEEE Power & Energy Magazine - Grid Edge 2023

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