NAenCAT – Smart Grids in Catalonia

Ormazabal is participating in collaboration with IREC, L’electra, ZIV and IGridT&D in the NAenCAT project.
The NAenCAT project aims to be a benchmark for new smart grids, providing innovative sensor, remote control and distributed automation systems to the Catalan electricity grid.

Objectives:

One of the objectives of the project is to develop new sensors based on low-cost criteria and adapted to the characteristics techniques of the Catalan electricity grid, which will increase knowledge of what is happening in the network. In addition, the capabilities of current remote control systems will be expanded, making them more robust and lower cost, allowing for more flexible grid operation and faster deployment. The project will also study the potential benefits for grid operation of energy storage systems and their integration into remote control, and will incorporate an innovative solution for distributed intelligent automation to complement the current centralized remote control solution, allowing the network to self-heal in the event of a failure. Finally, advanced algorithms will be developed for the correct coordination of the systems and technologies described above, as well as to convert the data generated by the systems into useful information. In this sense, network models will be combined with sensor data to obtain estimates of the network status in an economically efficient way.

Others:

All these technologies will be installed and validated in the network, in order to study their impact and benefits with respect to current systems and thus be able to plan their massive installation in the medium term, converting the Catalan electricity grid into an even smarter network.

With all this, NAenCAT will contribute to an increase in the observability, security and flexibility of the distribution networks.