IIC Journal of Innovation 5th Edition | Page 36

Outcomes, Insights, and Best Practices from IIC Testbeds: Microgrid Testbed
microgrids.
network working together. Because TSN is
an IEEE-governed standard, those devices
could all be made by different vendors and,
in theory, still operate as a single system.
This interoperability vision has played a large
role in guiding the efforts of the Microgrid
Testbed – will a new idea or element to
explore translate across multiple vendors?
Across different communication standards?
How would it work?
When designing a microgrid, there may be
good reason to run it completely off solar
power or all wind, using all local storage.
Examples, as mentioned above, include
forward operating military bases and remote
villages.
When inverters designed to be a small
percentage of generation capacity meet
topologies looking for high concentrations of
renewables, the problematic result is grid
instability.
S TRATEGY
The current Microgrid Testbed deployment
footprint is an experimentation unit set up in
the National Instruments Industrial IoT Lab
in Austin, Texas. The Industrial IoT Lab was
created to help companies work together on
innovative solutions and drive discussions
with domain experts to solve real world
challenges. In the interest of openness and
interoperability, it is encouraging other
vendors to come in, plug in their gear and
see if it works.
Engineers and researchers used the
synchronization aspect of TSN and the lab
build out of the Microgrid Testbed to
construct a microgrid capable of operating
with 100% of generation sourced by
inverter-based components.
The Microgrid Testbed has been designed to
demonstrate the concept with the standard
control scheme, and then flip over into “TSN
mode,” where the inverters that are running
solar, wind and storage profiles can
communicate with each other. They have a
sense of time. They have a sense of
prioritization. And those are two capabilities
this new TSN technology is bringing to the
table. Currently, there are no deployed grids
that are using TSN as the core technology to
synchronize inverters. In fact, TSN products
like the NI CompactRIO © controllers and
Cisco IE switches only became available on
the market recently. There are research
organizations investigating this technology
for the power grid and the Microgrid
Testbed team is working with some of them.
The demonstrator unit helps the testbed
team to engage with potential collaborators
and interested utility companies to focus on
the
communication
and
control
technologies such as DDS, TSN, OPC UA, and
OpenFMB that are the primary focus of the
testbed.
The testbed participants recognize that the
utility industry is, for good reason, very
cautious and deliberate with new
technologies. Safety and reliability are
paramount.
The testbed eventually needs to be deployed
in the field to fully test the solution. Getting
there requires a full bevy of system
components along with a utility company to
house the field test. The testbed team has
been in contact with several utilities in the
hope of a move to the next stage of field
In alignment with the Industrial Internet
Reference Architecture, one of the tenets of
the Microgrid Testbed is openness and
interoperability. The vision is to have all of
these inverters, controllers and protection
devices, on the same local microgrid
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September 2017