Communication Networks of Domestic Small-Scale Renewable Energy Systems

With the smart grid revolution, each house will have the ability to generate their own energy needs locally through renewable energy systems such as photovoltaic (PV) and wind turbines (WT). This paper presents the communication network architectures using both wireless and dedicated wired medium for monitoring and controlling the distributed energy systems (DES) including a small-scale WT and PV system. To monitor the condition of standalone system (PV and WT), the various types of sensors are used to collect different measurement data. The data transmission rate of each sensor is computed according to the sampling frequency. For DES in grid connected mode, the communication network of microgrid system is configured by hybrid architecture (wired-wireless). Based on network topology and different network configuration, OPNET modeler is used to evaluate the performance in view of total end-to-end delay using three different technologies; Ethernet based, Wi-Fi-based and ZigBee-based architectures.