The suburb as a power station

01Field scene

A street of generators.

Each roof with panels and an inverter is a power plant the utility does not dispatch. In aggregate, a feeder can export at noon and import heavily at six, and its voltage moves with the clouds.

Smart meters report energy every few minutes through a standard metering data model²; inverters can report and respond far faster. The question is which of those signals reaches whom, how quickly, and with what authority.

Figure as text: A residential street with rooftop generation, a community battery and a feeder

Two dozen pitched-roof houses in rows, a low-voltage feeder on poles along the bottom edge, a community battery and an edge node joined by dashed red links to two metering points.

• Meter and inverter
• Community battery
• Feeder
• Edge aggregator

02Systems diagram

Who listens to the inverter.

An inverter tested to the grid-support supplement can ride through faults and regulate voltage on its own³. Above it, an aggregator speaks a utility protocol such as the smart energy profile⁴, and the distribution operator decides what the feeder can take.

Cut the link to the aggregator and the street keeps its autonomous functions: volt-var and frequency response live in the inverter, as the interconnection standard requires¹. Switch the scenario to see which paths survive.

Figure as text: Grid-edge control, from the inverter to the distribution operator

A four-tier diagram: devices (inverters, a vehicle charger, a battery), the home gateway and meters, an aggregator at the edge, and the distribution operator. Red packets run from each device to the operator.

• Devices: Inverter A, Inverter B, EV charger, Battery
• Premises: Gateway, Smart meter, Gateway
• Aggregation: Aggregator, Meter head-end
• Distribution operator: DER management

11 links. Scenarios: Normal operation; Aggregator link lost; One gateway down.

03Timeline to 2030

From customers to market participants.

In the United States, wholesale markets must now admit aggregations of distributed resources⁵; the vehicle-to-grid protocol lets a charger negotiate power both ways⁶. Each step adds a party that needs trustworthy, timestamped measurements from the street.

Figure as text: Grid-edge standards and market rules

A timeline from 2018 to 2030 showing interconnection, protocol and market milestones.

1. 2018 Smart energy profile becomes IEEE 2030.5 (IEEE 2030.5). An application protocol for utilities to communicate with distributed resources.⁴
2. 2018-04 Interconnection standard revised (IEEE 1547-2018). Inverters must ride through disturbances and can provide voltage and frequency support.¹
3. 2020-09 Aggregations admitted to wholesale markets. Order 2222 directs market operators to let aggregated distributed resources participate.⁵
4. 2021-09 Grid-support inverter certification (UL 1741 SB). A supplement that tests inverters against the 2018 interconnection requirements.³
5. 2022-04 Bidirectional charging protocol (ISO 15118-20). The second generation of the vehicle-to-grid communication standard.⁶

04Simulator

What a community battery buys.

A battery shared by a street shifts the noon surplus into the evening peak. Its sizing is arithmetic: stored energy against load, and the daily harvest of the array against what the street draws. Set the values for a winter week and a summer week.

Figure as text: Battery autonomy and daily energy balance

A line chart of stored energy over fourteen days, falling or holding depending on the daily balance, with a dashed reserve line at 20 percent.