Friday, 27 January 2012
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space4energy

distributed power grid management based on space technologies

 

This study is being carried out by CARLO GAVAZZI SPACE - MILANO under the General Study Program (GSP) of the European Space Agency.

The main objective is to evaluate the contribution of space technologies in terms of Earth Observation, telecommunications and navigation satellites applied in the electrical power grids management, when distributed renewable energy plans are present in the grids. The quantitative assessment will be carried out in terms of well identified indicators already defined in the ESA Statement of Work and or in terms of new indicators defined during the present study.

Basically, the improvement space technologies could provide is related to the following two aspects:

  • Better exploitation of the renewable resources (power grid generation)
  • Improvements on power grid performances (power grid distribution)

Simulation experiments shall be proposed in order to assess and quantify this improvements with special focus on EO services contributions but including also NAV and TLC technologies.

These two aspects are strictly linked due to the fact that a better exploitation of the power generation sources could contribute to a better Distributed Power Grid Management (DPGM) and therefore on the distribution performances.

The satellite technologies contribution shall be investigated according to their roles:

  • Earth Observation from space can assist with DPGM systems by quantifying available energy resources in a timely and accurate manner, and by providing relevant geophysical parameters for modelling.
  • Satellite Navigation services can contribute to synchronize the network both for distributed data handling as to improve the performances on the power distribution.
  • Satellite TLC can provide a global and robust communication also for huge amount of data.

The project is led by Carlo Gavazzi Space (Milano, Italy), a space engineering industry with expertise in EO, NAV and TLC, with TERNA (Rome, Italy), the German Aerospace Center (DLR, D), the Center of Renewable Energy Sources (CRES, Gr) and RISOE National Laboratory (DK) .