An international workshop on Grid Inverters

Nice, Palais de la Méditerranée
December 9-th 2008

Grid inverters are key elements to massively integrate distributed renewable energy sources into the power system. A series of European workshops was initiated as a result of an international discussion held at the DERlab workshop on "DER Laboratories of Excellence, Testing, and Standards", during the "2nd International Conference on Integration of Renewable and Distributed Energy Resources" in Napa, California, Dec. 2006.

The main goal of this series of workshops is to define common European requirements for grid inverters of the future. The examined topics by European players during year 2008 are:

Behaviour under fault conditions: Fault ride through, loss-of-mains protection, network restoration (e.g. black start capability), interactions with the network protection systems
Energy management issues: Design parameters for the complete system (generation, load, storage, grid coupling), operation modes and their management strategies, congestion management
Communication and Control issues: Harmonised communication protocols, Bi-directional communication, Agent technologies, Grid monitoring, Virtual power plants
Ancillary Services: Improvement of power quality, Balancing power, demand side services
The output of the first two DERlab workshops to be held in Europe on June 2008 is the European draft for the international White Book on Grid Inverters. This draft will then be discussed at international level during the third DERlab workshop, which will run on December 9-th 2008 in Nice, juts before the "3rd International Conference on Integration of Renewable and Distributed Energy Resources".

The discussions of the international working group will be presented in a common closing session. The outcome of the workshops will be made available for all participants and will define the basis for discussions in international standardisation committees.

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