Online management and assessment of power quality issues through smart metering in smart grid architecture

With the growing Smart Grid concept, it has become very important to formulate and device the ways of intelligent control and supervision of electrical power distribution systems. As the distribution part is a major area among generation, transmission, and distribution, so without complete automation of the distribution system, a complete smart grid concept cannot be achieved. Therefore, a smart distribution system concept has been developed in this paper, where a vital role plays in the operation of smart meters having communication capabilities. This paper proposed two-level control architecture. MATLAB/SIMULINK model has been developed. The model studied consists of two low voltage (LV) distribution networks falling under one substation, thus two local controllers and one main controller have been modeled. To simulate the functionalities of controllers, different case scenarios such as overcurrent protection, power theft, no shutdown of essential loads (like hospitals, VIPs), available power loss, and phase unbalancing for 60 houses together in two areas have been studied and were compared with the real-time system through OPAL-RT. Performance of Dynamic Voltage Restorer (DVR) in case of voltage sag/swell and harmonics have been shown for enhancing power quality in distribution systems.