Guest Editorial Special Section on Monitoring, Visualization, and State Estimation for Distribution Systems

Inherited from legacy technologies, electric distribution systems are aging infrastructures whose component failures have a significant role in customer electricity interruptions. Low visibility and controllability of the distribution grid are a common practice today across the globe. In this circumstance, elements of the distribution grid including overhead distribution lines, underground cables, breakers, sectionalizers, etc. are being operated with very limited real-time data acquisition and virtually no remote control capability. The majority of failures are not detected by system operators unless interrupted customers notify them by phone. Very often (and particularly in municipal areas with underground networks), a distribution system is scattered across a large (and cumbersome) geographical region. Therefore, fault location and service restoration by nature is a difficult and prolonged process. Most of the associated tasks such as restoration are manually implemented, which necessitates dispatching field crew to the affected regions. The lack of controllability of the distribution system, specifically, related to balancing loads with available generation, impedes islanded operation of distribution system at the event of main grid failure. For example, while transmission systems have generator inertia and governor controls which stabilize frequency during emergencies, distribution systems do not have such automated actions. As a result, during emergencies, various distributed energy resources (DERs) that might be available are most likely switched off instead of serving some portions of the affected customers.