IEEE Power & Energy Magazine - May/June 2017 - 24

its technology platform to achieve the advanced functions envisioned in REV, including telecommunications,
grid automation, advanced metering infrastructure, grid
model enhancements, and planning and forecasting tools.
This will facilitate the integration of innovative alternatives to the planning process, including automated flags
for FICS candidates.
✔ Historical and real-time data requirements. To compound these issues, rural distribution networks typically
have low levels of automation and limited historical data,
including at the distribution substation level. The requirements of ANM mean that new monitoring and communications systems need to be deployed on the distribution
system in alignment with grid modernization objectives.

New Operational Systems
The ANM system from Smarter Grid Solutions deployed
in the FICS project was delivered on a hub-and-spoke control (part centralized, part distributed) platform known
as ANM Strata. This DERMS platform sits between the
advanced distribution management system (ADMS) and other
AVANGRID enterprise systems and the protection and control
devices in the field. The ANM system needs to operate in a
decentralized fashion to be scalable, but it must be integrated
into the ADMS for situational awareness, status, control, management, and data logging (i.e., no side systems in the control room). This is shown in Figure 2, where it can be seen
that ANM is deployed across the centralized and distributed
domains of the distribution system and is faster acting than
the ADMS and other centralized systems but not as fast acting
as protection systems.
The operator must be able to control and manage the
ANM system through feeder reconfiguration and contingencies. ANM must be modular to provide this end-to-end system and adopt a systems engineering approach to architecture
and design. This modularity is key, as the system must grow
and adapt to encompass DERs that connect to the distribution
system, responding to any changes to the power system it is
maintaining within operational limits. Due to the complexity
and interaction of multiple DER control, the ANM platform
must also use reliable and repeatable methods that not only

Locus of Control

Centralized

Supervisory Control
and Data Acquisition
Active Network
Management

Local

s
Time to Act

mins

figure 2. ANM as a new layer in distribution grid management.
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ieee power & energy magazine

FICS Project Use Cases
The ANM Strata platform is used to address several power
system constraints that limit the hosting capacity for DERs
on typical distribution circuits, e.g., feeders at 13 kV. These
use cases share many of the characteristics and features
of DER interconnection challenges in most geographies.

Voltage Management
In Figure 5, a PV generator connects to one of two circuits
being fed by the same substation. There are no other DERs
online or in the queue, but the addition of the PVs to this
circuit can cause the voltage to exceed operational limits at
the POCC of the PV site. In this case, connect+ will manage
export from the PV site to maintain voltage within limits by
interfacing directly with the inverter controls.

Power Flow Management

Protection, Automation,
and Control
ms

maximize the use of the available capacity on the distribution
system but also incorporate fail-to-safe actions (e.g., fall-back
settings) in the event of communications failures, bad data, or
nonconformance of DERs to a set point.
In Figure 3, it can be seen that the hub of the ANM Strata
platform is deployed and integrated with a range of enterprise
systems via a set of standard integration adapters on the ANM
platform, within the sgs comms hub platform component in
Figure 3. The sgs core component hosts applications that implement real-time algorithms for power flow and voltage management. The spokes of the ANM platform are deployed to each
DER device in the form of sgs connect, a platform-independent
software component that can run on the types of devices found
in substations for control and automation purposes.
Each DER unit participating in the FICS project will
have a dedicated spoke through a software instance of sgs
connect deployed locally. This software can be deployed on
a range of hardware options typically found in substations,
including remote terminal units and programmable logic
controllers and within a software container on a low footprint or communications device. The software manages
DER real and reactive power, voltage, and power factor and
can open/close/reclose the site circuit breaker. The device
does this based on monitored power system parameters at
the DER site's point of common coupling (POCC) when
deployed as a standalone solution or based on set points
received from the "hub" components of the ANM platform
(i.e., via the comms hub component), ensuring that grid constraints are obeyed. When deployed standalone, e.g., to
manage the POCC only, then the solution is referred to as
connect+. An example of connect+ deployment is provided
in Figure 4.

In Figure 6, there are three DER units connected on separate
circuits all being fed by the same substation. The addition of
a new DER will result in reverse power flow to the substation and a thermal capacity constraint. The ANM system
will monitor measurement point 1 (MP1) and calculate the
may/june 2017

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Power & Energy Magazine - May/June 2017