Design and implementation of a smart metering infrastructure for low voltage microgrids

The distributed generation (DG) and the integration of renewable energy sources (RESs) have leveraged the improvement of the smart grid for a few decades. The smart home energy management systems (HEMSs) have also attracted attention in increasing the use of information and communication technologies in the context of smart grid applications. This paper proposes a smart metering infrastructure with DC and AC analog front ends (AFEs), wired and wireless communication interfaces, and remote monitoring software coded in Visual C#. The implemented metering device has been comprised of isolated measurement transducers for detecting the current and voltage rates of sources and various types of loads either in a microgrid or smart home application. The signal conditioning tier has been comprised of highly accurate and sensitive operational amplifiers, and signal processing has been accomplished by a PIC microcontroller which is capable to interface USB and ZigBee based wireless communication protocols. The processed measurement data have been transmitted with wireless communication, and a graphical user interface (GUI) software has been coded at the receiving end host computer. The measurement case studies have been experimentally performed in microgrid and HEMS infrastructures to validate the accuracy of the proposed smart metering device and software operated at the host computer.