Distributed Energy Resource ICT Reference Architecture: Distributed Control Architecture for Hardware Limited Internet of Things DERs

For Distributed Energy Resources to participate in the grid, and help solve the problems of unreliability and inefficiency, caused by weather dependent, and distributed energy resources, they must have a processing unit, data connection, and an ICT architecture. The aim of the paper is to describe the software components of the ICT architecture, thereby improving the design of scalable ICT architectures for automatically controlled DERs. Future plug ‘n’ play software components that improve the scalability and eases the development of such ICT architectures are also described in the paper. The ICT architecture should be scalable to many different types of DERs with minimal effort and should enable control by automated generic controlling entities. The ICT architecture primarily consists of three layers, the driver layer that uses native communication to talk to the unit hardware, the data layer that supplies historical data, real-time data, and future prediction to the communication layer, which is responsible for talking to the controlling entities. With the plug ‘n’ play extension components which adds the application launcher, automatic configuration, selfhealing and topology detection.