Cyber Physical Systems Applications with a Case Study of Intelligent Dispatch of PV

Increased investments into renewable energy as distributed energy sources throughout the distribution grid are a driving force behind the need to adopt smart grid advances. Issues such as intermittency of generation from these renewables have been studied concerning the stability of the grid at higher penetration levels. One need that industry meetings have pointed out is the need for forecasting models and advanced controls that mitigate the intermittency effects. Wide-scale adoption of computing nodes into the power grid such as smart meters and smart inverters have transformed the traditional grid into a cyber-physical system (CPS), as well as independent CPS nodes such as microgrids. Centralized command and control are necessary to maintain visibility over resources and management of them. With developments in cyber-physical-systems integrations more distributed controllers are potential. Data collection becomes a more challenging task as the number of intelligent devices in the field that generates data increases. New key-store based database technologies could be utilized in highly heterogeneous data environments. One of the potential distributed CPS controllers are demonstrated in this paper is a case study of a forecasting based economic dispatch controller for large scale PV power plant that is part of the energy mix. The cost in this scenario is found to be lower when the controller is used.