Study of data acquisition and communication equipment for micro-grid system

Recently power systems reduce the use of the fossil fuel and use environment friendly resources. Specially, power systems have more Distributed Generation, which installs near the consumer, increasingly. The resources of Distributed Generation are more clean and economical than conventional generation and fit into the variable power demand. Generally, Distributed Generator installs in consumer or near consumer for reducing transmission cost. The large-scale Distributed Generators connect with Power Company, and supplies electrical power energy to consumer via power grid. On the contrary, small-scale renewable energy resources in consumer side can supply the electrical power to the local consumer and other consumers, which connect with power system. The change of the power system configuration needs for development of the equipment that controls and/or monitoring the power system. There are too many efforts in development of the monitor and control the power system. From these results lead to develop the EMS (Energy Management System) and SCADA (Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition) system. Nevertheless, these systems are too huge and too expensive to install in consumer side that works with small-scale renewable energy source. From that reason, it is need that develop a small size and inexpensive equipment that role of EMS or SCADA. In this paper describes development process of the inexpensive monitoring equipment that works with Distributed Generator at consumer side, and shows validity of measuring data. The roles of developed equipment is measuring voltage/current and storing measured data into hard disk drives in the general PC via USB communication. Further, that is calculating active/reactive power and detecting abnormal conditions and communicates with a higher control system.