Page 129 - Decision Making Applications in Modern Power Systems

94 Decision Making Applications in Modern Power Systems

4.2.2.2 Modern monitoring devices
Real-time monitoring and display of the devices and performance in a wide
area is a key parameter to understand and optimize the system operation.
Advanced system awareness avoids blackouts and reports the system logs to
predict and prevent probable faults, generate data for future decision-
makings, prevent wide-area disturbances, and improve the transmission capa-
bility and reliability of the grid. This feature is the beginning of the path that
leads to PQIs. Without monitoring devices, smart grid is just a grid, but
enabling this feature will grant more efficiency, quickness, and precision to
PQI in smart microgrids.

4.2.2.3 Information and communication technology
Communication technology will play an important role in improving the
power quality issues of smart microgrids. Previously, most of these devices
were trying to become dependent on communication that will have some
drawbacks such as uncertainty of data and latency. Other researchers sug-
gested using low-bandwidth communication system that was not so efficient.
Some research have been done to make the communication technology more
reliable by predicting the lost bits in the communication links. However,
after all, the lack of proper, fast, and high-bandwidth communication system
is a drawback for the PQI devices. With a reliable, fast communication tech-
nology the power quality of smart microgrid will improve a lot.

4.2.2.4 Smart appliances
Nowadays, most of the home appliance manufacturers have started to include
smart chips inside the home appliances to make it possible for each device
to have a two-way communication with the grid, other than the ability to be
controlled from almost everywhere while taking part in demand response
program. A category of smart appliances could be smart loads, which could
directly influence the smart grid power quality; more details about the opera-
tion of these devices could be found in Ref. [15].

4.2.2.5 Storage devices
With the increasing penetration of probabilistic RESs, using storage devices
is an inevitable part of the smart microgrids. Appearance of advanced elec-
tricity storage technologies has greatly influenced the vision for the future of
this technology. Deployment and integration of advanced storage device
technologies, such as the flywheel, super capacitors, advanced
sodium sulfur battery technologies, flow batteries along with compressed
air, and pumped hydro and thermal storage technologies, have created a
wide vision for the future of smart grids [16,17]. Developments in storage