Real-Time Hardware-in-the-Loop Distributed Energy Resources System Testbed using IEEE 2030.5 Standard
IEEE 2030.5 standard is drawing special attention among communication protocols for smart inverters and distributed energy resources (DER). Moreover, California Rule 21 mandates new DER must be ready to communicate to a host utility using the IEEE 2030.5 standard. Therefore, development of an effective real-time simulation method for managing DER using IEEE 2030.5 network is crucial. This paper presents a real-time hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) DER system testbed using the IEEE 2030.5 standard. The proposed real-time co-simulation testbed consists of a DER physical system simulation using OP AL-RT real-time simulator and a cyber system simulation including DER gateways and a DER management system (DERMS) cloud server. Custom-built client and server programs are developed to meet the compliant with IEEE 2030.5-2018 standard and implemented in the DER gateways and a DERMS server, respectively. Furthermore, the feasibility of the proposed testbed for DER systems is validated by experiments.