Today, the traditional centralized grid is often suffering from frequent instabilities, outages, and uncertainty. In particular, the outages result in a large number of consumers going for hours, days, or weeks without electricity. The situation is even worse during harsh conditions such as hurricanes, earthquakes, wildfires, and other disasters that not only interfere with the grid but also with the supply chain.
An outage leads to lost productivity while some consumers opt to invest in additional alternative power systems such as fossil fuel generators, which are not only costly but harmful to the environment. Frequent outages often leave most of the consumers uncertain as to whether they will get power throughout the day or not. To overcome these challenges and improve reliability, many institutions, organizations, industrial and commercial consumers are turning to Niccau Micro Grid Solutions.
Isolated Micro Grid Solution
The off-grid microgrids have no physical connection to the main grid, sometimes due to the lack of a nearby or economically viable transmission and distribution infrastructure. Since there they are isolated from the main network, the remote microgrids operate in the island mode throughout their service life. Most of the remote microgrids use renewable sources such as solar, wind, hydro, and others which are more sustainable. A storage system is necessary to provide power when the generation from the sources is low.
Non – Isolated Micro Grid Solution
When operating in grid-connected mode, the microgrid offers demand response, voltage and frequency regulation, reactive power support, and other grid services. As such, it helps to improve the power quality and reliability while enabling the utility to meet peak demand requirements without investing in additional generating capacity.
Explore our solutions and business opportunities
In a world where rapid urbanization, together with the need to reduce CO2 emissions, has created a need for better technology, microgrids can support and protect continuous power flow.
This is a solution for modern utilities that seek smart, highly reliable, and resilient grids powered by clean energy in areas where grid instability is common, but it is also for those who seek new business opportunities and additional services for their customers. Whether it’s providing for remote communities or protecting the power flow from emergencies or attacks, Niccau’s microgrid technology offers comprehensive solutions to meet every need.
For Microgrid Electricity Market Operators, Niccau microgrid solutions offer the ability to control and coordinate their customer’s distributed energy resources and enable those customers to be rewarded for providing services to the broader grid.
Power Management and Control Solutions
Ensuring a reliable and stable power supply in an industrial, data center, infrastructure, or utility microgrid by meeting demand, maintaining frequency and voltage, as well as grid commitment
Introduction of battery energy storage systems, associated with renewable power sources, working in tandem with utility grid connection and conventional captive generation like diesel, gas has added new dimensions to overall expectations from power management solutions. And infusion of electric vehicle infrastructure to the microgrid network only adds further challenges.
The “traditional” PMS solution already covers for industrial segment, where gas and diesel generation units work in parallel with the utility grid.
The microgrid power management system solution or microgrid control solution incorporates a cluster of products such as PLC units, Relion protection relays, Remote IO RIO600, Ekip Up protection units, PCS100 Energy Storage Systems, HiPerGuard UPS, as well as 3rd party products such as tariff and energy meters, governor and AVR systems, battery management systems, fire safety systems, HVAC systems, etc.
In addition to the above, Niccau’s Optimax or equivalent as an energy optimization and load forecasting application can also be integrated to the microgrid PMS solution.
The solution uses IEC 61850 as the predominantly binding communication standard, along with OPC DA/UA, Modbus TCP for exchange of data between the Niccau solution components and also 3rd party systems such as battery management, governors and AVR units.
Scope
The BESS/microgrid PMS solution has the capability to handle both transition and steady state functionality, in accordance to IEEE 2030.7, and national grid code standards. It comprises of the following functionality:
Transition functions:
- Unplanned islanding
- Resynchronization
- Black start sequence
Steady state functions:
- Grid codes handling
- Load-shedding
- System-wide active and reactive power control
- Unit level active and reactive power control
- Automatic-synchronization of generators
- Demand control at point of interconnection
- Spinning reserve management
- Peak shaving
- Frequency regulation
- Voltage regulation
- Battery state of charge control
- Disturbance ride-through during intermittent undervoltage conditions, when microgrid exports power
Benefits
- Distributed architecture for better reliability, accurate control actions, state-of-the-art features
- Offers increased flexibility and scalability and improved system integration and customization, fulfilling a variety of requirements
- Safeguards and provides value for investments
- Ensures reliability of power
- Customized to suit customer project requirements
Microgrid Power Management Controller
Enabling a distributed approach towards microgrid power management solutions
Depending on the system complexity, operational philosophy, availability considerations, the microgrid/BESS PMS controller can be configured such as:
- single or redundant CPU and IO configurations
- physically separate units for generation source (unit) level control and system wide control functions
OR
- hosting both functions in a single physical unit
Niccau PLCs, which have been adapted for BESS/microgrid control applications, using specific application software libraries, project specific application logic.
The BESS/ microgrid PMS controller interfaces with multiple systems, Ekip Up protection units, PCS100/3rd party BESS, as well as 3rd party products such as tariff and energy meters, governor and AVR systems, battery management systems, fire safety systems, HVAC systems etc.
These interfaces between the BESS/ microgrid PMS controller and other systems/products are based on IEC 61850 (MMS/GOOSE), OPC (DA/UA), Modbus TCP and hardwired IOs.
Scope
The BESS/microgrid PMS controller has the capability to handle steady state functionality, subsequent to a transition event and in accordance to IEEE 2030.7 microgrid standard.
- Load-shedding
- System-wide active and reactive power control
- Unit level active and reactive power control
- Demand control at point of interconnection
- Spinning reserve management
- Peak shaving
- Frequency regulation
- Voltage regulation
- Battery state of charge control
- Country/Utility specific grid codes handling
Benefits
- Flexibility of deployment
- Versatility
- High performance
- Open interfaces for non-Niccau product/systems integration
Smart Power solutions for Microgrids
Resiliency, sustainability and increased productivity thanks to digitalization and high-quality electric power
As a pioneer in energy management and optimization, Niccau is a trusted partner in the evolving global energy ecosystem.
Niccau’s Smart Power solutions are leading energy innovation and transition to new ways of managing the energy, starting from commercial and industrial sites aiming to unlock new economic opportunities, up to utilities and service providers striving to effectively manage their increased portfolio of renewables and distributed energy resources, as well as marine vessels and communities seeking energy sustainability.
Microgrid applications
Campuses and Institutions
Commercial Buildings
Industries
Communities and Utilities
Marine AC Applications