A biological approach for energy management in smart grids and hybrid energy storage systems

The concept of smart grid has evolved during the last years. Smart grid is now a collection of power devices, Distributed Energy Sources (DES), Renewable Energy Sources (RES), and monitoring devices using Information and Communication Technology (ICT) to interact between them. A proper power network management needs to be resilient, reliable, and redundant to prevent malfunctions in the power network operation. This paper presents a biological approach to manage smart grids using characteristics such as self healing, different types of control strategies (feedback, feed forward), learning algorithms, different types of energetic storage, and a hierarchical architecture. These characteristics are present in living beings and are important in the smart grid management. An analogy between biological systems and technological systems is made and the similarities between these two systems are presented. A particular case of biological approach applicability in a Hybrid Energy Storage System (HESS) is presented to demonstrate how this approach can be scaled from a single energy cell to an entire power network.