Fault-tolerant generator telecontrol over a microgrid IP network

The liberalization of the energy markets, combined with the drive towards a low-carbon economy, has led to the development of the concept of the smart grid. The smart grid is an energy distribution network that enables real-time information exchange for monitoring, control and protection of energy equipment as well as the physical transfer of energy. When smart grid control applications such as generator regulation are implemented over standard IP networks, the stability of the closed-loop has been found to be highly dependent upon the network induced delay, jitter and packet losses. In this paper, we propose and test a fault-tolerant buffering technique and related control design method to enable the effective telecontrol of a generator in such a situation. Computational experiments demonstrate that clear improvements to the closed loop performance and stability can be observed.