Towards a future SCADA

Abstract

Currently, power systems (PS) already accommodate a substantial penetration of DG and operate in competitive environments. In the future PS will have to deal with large-scale integration of DG and other distributed energy resources (DER), such as storage means, and provide to market agents the means to ensure a flexible and secure operation. This cannot be done with the traditional PS operation. SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) is a vital infrastructure for PS. Current SCADA adaptation to accommodate the new needs of future PS does not allow to address all the requirements. In this paper we present a new conceptual design of an intelligent SCADA, with a more decentralized, flexible, and intelligent approach, adaptive to the context (context awareness). Once a situation is characterized, data and control options available to each entity are re-defined according to this context, taking into account operation normative and a priori established contracts. The paper includes a case-study of using future SCADA features to use DER to deal with incident situations, preventing blackouts.