Review of the State-of-the-Art on Adaptive Protection for Microgrids based on Communications

TL;DR

This paper reviews current adaptive protection strategies for microgrids, emphasizing the critical role of ultra-reliable, low-latency communication technologies like 5G to enable effective, coordinated protection in systems with distributed energy resources.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive review of communication technologies and optimization methods for adaptive protection in microgrids, highlighting future prospects with 5G and multi-connectivity.

Findings

Communication reliability and latency are critical for adaptive protection.

5G and multi-connectivity are promising for future microgrid protection.

The review identifies key challenges and research directions.

Abstract

The dominance of distributed energy resources in microgrids and the associated weather dependency require flexible protection. They include devices capable of adapting their protective settings as a reaction to (potential) changes in system state. Communication technologies have a key role in this system since the reactions of the adaptive devices shall be coordinated. This coordination imposes strict requirements: communications must be available and ultra-reliable with bounded latency in the order of milliseconds. This paper reviews the state-of-the-art in the field and provides a thorough analysis of the main related communication technologies and optimization techniques. We also present our perspective on the future of communication deployments in microgrids, indicating the viability of 5G wireless systems and multi-connectivity to enable adaptive protection.