Towards Smart Grid system validation: Integrating the SmartEST and the SESA laboratories

The evolution of the European electrical energy system has been in progress for several years now. During this process the complexity of the overall power system has been continuously increasing. Installing new components and concepts into the interrelated infrastructure is getting more complicated as their impacts are hard to predict. Moreover, the energy system is a critical infrastructure that cannot be jeopardized by components with unclear behavior. Thus, new approaches have to be tested and validated in complex, large-scale co-simulations. In this paper an integration of two different laboratory infrastructures is introduced that enables such co-simulation analysis. On the one hand, the SmartEST laboratory in Austria is focusing on distributed energy resources, power electronic components as well as their integration issues. The SESA laboratory in Germany, on the other hand, addresses mainly hard- and software simulation integration.