Low voltage DC microgrids are at their ground of research with ready to use technology on the market still immature. Standardization initiatives on basic approaches such as voltage levels, power or energy range are just now discussed over international bodies. There is however a large interest from the society and energy end-users toward this move motivated by a good potential to get into 100% renewables era, electrical transportation and resilient communities against natural human-made disasters, to name a few. Within this context, the DCNextEve project extended the research beyond the state of the art in several directions of research, such as:
- Several economic and societal benefits were identified from the role of prosumer as LVDCMGs former such as: potential to lowering the costs for connection to the grid, potential to reduce the costs of energy for the local consumers/prosumers, potential for innovative business models in a local energy-market, potential to reduce the energy curtailment from RES, increased local consumption of the energy produced locally and reduction in power losses in the associated power distribution systems.
- In terms of design and modelling of LVDCMGs, a comprehensive methodology for critical evaluation of technologies and architectures compatible with LVDC microgrids exhibiting technical and regulatory resilience was validated through extensive measurements and real-time operation tests;
- In terms of qualitative evaluation of technologies compatible with LVDC microgrids, several KPIs for power quality at low voltage DC grids were defined and evaluated. As a dissemination and exploitation perspective, with societal and technical impact, they were critically discussed with the Power Quality Measurement Methods Working Group from IEC and further progress towards standardization is expected;
- Adaptive, distributed schemes for operation and control of LVDC microgrids were validated through extensive simulations and real-time operation in laboratory-scale set-ups. They expanded the state of the art with innovative and efficient methods for estimating and bounding uncertainty coming from consumption and production of local energy. Adaptability and expandability are their major advantages compared with state-of-the-art methods.
These major contributions are expected to be of great interest to the research and academic community, as well as to the power system industry, such as DSOs and electrical energy providers, and especially to prosumers and the promoters of future developments of smart microgrids.
