By Jesse Berst

Called "Flexible Plug and Play," the $15 million project is funded in part by the UK's Office of Gas and Electricity Markets (Ofgem). The project is led by UK Power Networks, a distribution utility serving 8 million homes and businesses in London, the East and the Southeast of England. Supplier participants include Silver Spring Networks, Cable&Wireless Worldwide, Alstom and others.

The urgent need to connect more wind

The UK needs more wind farms to meet its 2020 carbon mandates. As things stand now, it is too expensive and too risky for wind developers to build. Not because of the cost of the windmills themselves. But because of the cost and time to connect to the grid.

A "business as usual" grid connection would cost a wind developer in the neighborhood of $8 million, according to Project Director Cristiano Marantes. That's because the UK transmission grid is already congested. Connecting a number of wind farms within a relatively small area would create voltage constraints, thermal constraints, and reverse power flows.

Yet upgrading or reinforcing the grid would be very expensive. The traditional piecemeal approach would "deliver suboptimal results, higher connection costs, extended lead times and uncertainty" says Marantes, making the investment unattractive to wind developers

Substituting technology for towers and cables

The solution, UK Power Networks decided, was to test smart solutions in place of traditional network reinforcement. Marantes estimates that standing up a wind farm in business-as-usual terms would require roughly 13 kilometers of new overhead lines. The project's new "plug and play" system would typically require a mere 500 meters.

In brief, the new system uses dynamic line rating and active network management to run existing lines much closer to capacity without danger, thereby minimizing the need for new lines. Marantes told me the project is pioneering in several other areas as well:

·         Active phase-shifting transformers (Alstom)

·         Active network management

·         Active power flow management

·         Controllers for wind turbines to ramp up and down as network conditions require

·         A purpose-built, IP-based communications network (Silver Spring Networks along with Cable&Wireless). The network is for transmission-level work and will be separate from future networks that will carry smart metering information.