IEEE Power & Energy Magazine - March/April 2017 - 23

regulation and frequency control. SCE has just concluded a significant research and demonstration effort with the Pacific Northwest National Lab and the software provider Qado Energy to
examine impacts and mitigation strategies for the high penetration of solar PVs. Additionally, the IGP is intended to fielddemonstrate SCE's architecture principles to improve the
implementation of a modernized grid as well as inform future
enhancements to the grid. The DRP demonstrations will seek
to validate the methodologies developed within the DRP and
show how a modern grid can better enable DERs and operate
effectively at high levels of DER penetration. The following
sections will explain these programs in more detail and show
how a modern grid with modern capabilities is possible at SCE.

NODES
The Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E)
NODES program is designed to enable a high penetration
of renewables (>50%) by developing grid control methods
using flexible loads and DERs. SCE is a partner in three
NODES projects and expects to learn significant lessons that
can be integrated into our grid modernization plans. Here is
a quick synopsis of these projects.
✔✔ GE Global Research's Synthetic Reserves from Aggregated Distributed Flexible Resources project will
develop a novel distributed flexibility resource technology that aggregates responsive flexible loads and
DERs to provide synthetic reserve services to the grid
while maintaining customer quality of service.
✔✔ National Renewable Energy Laboratory's project, RealTime Optimization and Control of Next-Generation
Distribution Infrastructure, will develop a comprehensive distribution network management framework that
unifies real-time voltage and frequency control at the
home/DER controllers' level with network-wide energy
management at the utility/aggregator level.
✔✔ Pacific Northwest National Laboratory's Multi-Scale
Incentive-Based Control of Distributed Assets project
will develop and test a hierarchical control framework
for coordinating the flexibility of a full range of DERs,
including flexible building loads, to supply reserves to
the electric power grid.
The aggregation and effective use of DERs is a significant
advance from the current approach of treating these resources
as a negative load and adjusting a net load forecast. The aggregation becomes effective as it aligns with the circuit and substation characteristics and the integration of this aggregation into
how the utility plans and operates the grid. This collaboration
among the utility, resource provider, and customer will need to
increase to enable the full potential of the resources.

Smart Inverter Field Demonstrations
SCE has been testing smart inverters in its laboratories for
several years. The next step is to field-demonstrate how smart
inverters will work connected at customer sites and interacting with the grid. SCE is a project partner on two California
march/april 2017

Energy Commission (CEC)-administered projects in their
Advancing Cleaner, Less Costly, More Reliable Distributed
Generation to Enable Customer Solutions and Zero Net
Energy Communities program. Projects under this program
focus on evaluating advanced inverter functionalities and
benefits of multiple clustered smart inverters in real-world
pilot demonstrations.
✔✔ Electric Power Research Institute's Assessing the Ability of Smart Inverters and Smart Consumer Devices
to Enable More Residential Solar Energy project will
leverage a standard modular interface for inverters that
would allow products to work with any communications technology through plug-in modules. The project
aims to evaluate the interactions among multiple smart
inverters and the corresponding impacts on local PV
hosting capacity. Approximately five of these smart
inverters will be installed at customer facilities either
at the same or neighboring transformers as part of the
IGP described below.
✔✔ Sunspec Alliance's project, Smart Inverter Interoperability Standards and Open Testing Framework to
Support High-Penetration Distributed Photovoltaics
and Storage, demonstrates the ability of residential
DER assets to provide ancillary grid services while being managed through an aggregator. In addition, SCE
intends to use the IEEE 2030.5 standard protocol to
communicate between the aggregator and utility, demonstrating how DER status data and control commands
can be exchanged in a standard manner. Fifty of these
communicating inverters connected to PVs and battery energy storage will be installed on a circuit and
be managed along with thermostat-controlled loads as
part of the IGP.

The IGP
The IGP has combined several demonstration projects funded by the CPUC's Electric Program Investment Charge
(EPIC) program but is also leveraging the EPIC funds administered by the CEC and funds provided through the U.S.
Department of Energy. This is being done by focusing ongoing efforts like SCE's participation in the three NODES
projects described earlier and leveraging the two CEC smart
inverter projects described in the previous section. Focusing
the IGP on a single area in SCE's 50,000-mi2 service area
allows emerging technologies like distributed control, smart
switches, and adaptive protection to provide a realistic test
bed to determine the feasibility and future of these technologies (Figure 3). The shaded areas encompass two substations
in the Santa Ana, California, area and are also in an area targeted by SCE for the installation of DERs as part of SCE's
Preferred Resource Pilot (PRP).
The IGP is structured around ten subprojects that investigate specific aspects of the components of grid modernization and show how they might be integrated into a
scalable system.
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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Power & Energy Magazine - March/April 2017