With regards to the substantial outcomes of this action, we summarize the main aspects of progress beyond the state of the art and the plans forward.
With our work on the digital twin of a distribution system (DS) transformer (T/F) we contributed in the scoped field as follows:
- The waveform monitoring allows to determine power quality in real time, as it captures all harmonics content,
- Medium Voltage (MV) DS behavior under faults can be captured fully to alert the system operator and logged for further analysis,
- The MV-side waveforms outputted by the digital twin of the T/F are as accurate as the measurements of an instrument T/F (which are a particularly constly topology used to the day) on the MV side of the actual T/F,
- Technical personnel and system operator can assess immediately any remedial actions to system events,
- Installation of MV side measurement devices requires the MV network to be interrupted under fewer circumstances, thus, enabling a comparably seamless deployment.
From our work with the surveys of Distribution System Operators (DSOs) in Europe we concluded that:
• There is no monitoring for reliability or reinforcement purposes and, typically, the respective concerns are handled with reports and/or according to experience,
• DSOs have immense interests in reducing average outage duration for each customer served (the performance metric also known as SAIDI),
• Monitoring of DS is sought for to also accommodate distributed generation and storage,
• Many DSOs have used (to some extent) SCADA in monitoring distribution systems, which implies there are legacy effects from what is practiced in transmission systems,
• Gathering monitoring data and an easy-to-use interface are important features of the monitoring infrastructure DSOs plan to design and deploy,
• The low voltage grid specifically is very sparsely if not at all monitored, although most customers are equipped with advanced monitoring infrastructure in the form of smart meters.
Our proposal on the DS SE we achieve the following:
• It relies on a scarce measurement infrastructure, reducing, thus, the concerns for wide and costly monitoring device deployments,
• It is based on a linearized power flow formulation, to avoid processing requirements that contradict the aspirations for decentralized implementation.
• Pseudomeasurements are not required for the SE (as historical data that are needed to generate them, may not be considered readily available), thus, making it a self-contained method.
• The method answers the DSO expectations about congestion and power quality monitoring.