The IIC Announces Microgrid Testbed Results and Publishes Whitepaper

By Ken Briodagh May 01, 2018

In a recent release, The Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC), an organization transforming business and society by accelerating the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), announced that its testbed has hit significant milestones and has published the Synchronized and Business-Ready Microgrid whitepaper. IIC members Real-Time Innovations (RTI), the IIoT connectivity company, and Wipro Limited, a global information technology, consulting and business process services company, wrote the whitepaper based on findings from the IIC Communications & Control Testbed for Microgrid Applications (Microgrid Testbed), which also includes IIC members Cisco and National Instruments.

The IIC Microgrid Testbed began in 2015 with a goal to introduce the flexibility of real-time analytics and control to increase efficiencies in this legacy process, ensuring that power is generated more accurately and reliably. This whitepaper offers some of the findings from this testbed

“The emergence of generation and storage technologies, such as solar and wind, has enabled grid operators to feed power back to the main grid and reduce demand for fossil fuels. However, renewable energy sources generate direct current and require conversion to alternating current at the exact phase and frequency as the main grid,” said Brett Murphy, Senior Director, Market Development, Industrial IoT, RTI and co-author of the IIC whitepaper. “Synchronizing these inverters as renewable generation rises above 40% of the total generation in a portion of the grid is quite challenging and can fail – leading to a blackout. Cisco, NI, RTI and Wipro created a testbed to experiment with new approaches to address the challenge. We’ve developed techniques for a 100% renewable power generation-based microgrid to support a variety of business models and demonstrated success in our test environment.”

The full Synchronized and Business-Ready Microgrid whitepaper and a list of IIC members who contributed can be found on the IIC website: https://www.iiconsortium.org/pdf/Synchronized_and_Business-Ready_Microgrid_20180426.pdf

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Ken Briodagh is a writer and editor with more than a decade of experience under his belt. He is in love with technology and if he had his druthers would beta test everything from shoe phones to flying cars.

Edited by Ken Briodagh

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