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SMART ENERGY CLIMAGRID – “3D” VISION FOR THE SMART GRID By V.L.G. Gardiman, M.G. Marigo, O. Pinto Jr., G. Zepka, A.C.V. Saraiva, K.P. Naccarato, and Iara R.C.A Pinto Global warming, widely discussed in the world, has impacted on environmental and meteorological variables, a fact that has been requiring the development of several technological innovations to mitigate such effects. In the electricity sector, one of the greatest contributions has been the application of the concept of smart grids that aims at integration of diverse sources of clean energy and more efficient and rational consumption of the same. Additionally, these networks enable companies to power a broad control over all information relating to their systems. The ClimaGrid project integrates information of climatic and environmental variables in the smart grids, seeking to assess the impact of these external agents on the behavior of the grid. Thus, it introduces the third vector of information, creating the concept “3D” for the Smart Grid. The project was launched in December 2010 and the first phase was completed recently. A second phase is beginning now and will be completed by the end of 2015. It has several tools already available. INTRODUCTION The EDP Group (Energia de Brazil) manages several companies in Brazil, among them two electricity distributors: EDP Bandeirante and EDP Escela. EDP ​​Bandeirante is one of the largest electricity distributors in the State of São Paulo, with 1.5 million customers and a concession area of ​​9600 km². EDP ​​Escelsa is the largest distributor of electricity in the State of Espírito Santo, with 1.2 million customers and a concession area of ​​41,200 km². Meteorological and environmental factors are the cause of a large number of events in Electric Power Systems across the planet, such as interruptions, breakdowns, seasonal consumption and power generation. In the specific case of Brazil, the occurrence of severe storms associated with high amounts of lightning, heavy rainfall and intense winds has become increasingly prevalent. Additionally, intra-cloud and cloud-to-ground data, from the Brazilian Lightning Detection Network (BrasilDAT), deployed in August 2011, is integrated. Information on vegetation from high resolution satellite images was also included in the project. All this information is on a GIS platform (Geographical Information System) and is stored on specific servers that were installed in EDP Escelsa and EDP Bandeirante for this purpose. The weather information is produced and made available automatically, through interactive M2M (Machine to Machine) with redundant architecture between servers. The system integrates information in space-time, providing operational tools easy to use for Operation Centers, Measurement Centers and Back Office Engineering and Planning. These tools provide real-time data, historical data and forecast data for some weather events, in order to contribute to the immediate decisions and offline studies, in order to minimise the impacts of these variables on the electric power system. SOME APPLICATIONS IMPLEMENTED Among the various tools available in the project, we highlight a few: Figure 1 shows an application to monitor and evaluate in real time the severity of a storm identified by the color of the scan area. The place where the greatest intensity occurs is indicated by a black circle, the so-called storm core. You can also identify the likely spread in the storm area marked in grey. This application uses real-time data of intra-cloud discharges, unprecedented in the country. In addition, this information is stored in a database to enable the reproduction of the phenomenon for further evaluation. In our country, it is estimated that 40-50% of outages are associated with the occurrence of lightning (Pinto, 2011), and climate change due to global warming tends to make these numbers even more critical. Given the above, the EDP Group in Brazil has invested in technology to manage information around weather phenomena, in order to improve the control of the power grid in real-time and post-operation, through the project ClimaGrid in partnership the National Institute for Space Research (INPE). DEVELOPMENT In this paper we discuss a new computer system that is part of the ClimaGrid project and integrates environmental and meteorological parameters such as surface temperature, humidity, atmospheric pressure, rainfall, wind direction and intensity available through the Weather Research and Forecasting model (WRF). 86 Figure 1 – Tool Interface, allows a Real Time Tempest Severity Estimate Figure 2 shows the new model used to predict lightning called Potential Lightning Region (PLR), which tells the probability of lightning occurring in a given region up to 12 hours in advance. The tool uses the results of the WRF model that is tuned to provide information with spatial resolution of 5 km. This application started to be used in December 2012 in the Operation Centers of EDP Bandeirante and EDP Escelsa and the preliminary results obtained so far indicate a high level of accuracy (close to 90% in the daily forecasts). METERING INTERNATIONAL ISSUE - 4 | 2013