Two activities are undertaken in two demonstrations sites:
- For the urban area, a district of the community of Rolle has been selected as the demonstration site. This area combines commercial and residential customers; include a balanced number of customers that allows the production of meaningful results while avoiding high risk of social reactions. Therefore, two 20 kV outgoing feeders in an open loop have been selected covering the power needs of 4’000 customers; 3.35 MVA of load spreads through 32 distribution stations. Also, 23 PV units (430 kVA) have already been installed which will reduce the cost for new installations and serves as an indicator of the acceptability of the renewable energy technologies and innovative solution at least by a part of the customers. Fiber optics is already in place, which is required for communication. There are currently no metering or energy storage facilities on the network that allows for experimentation of new solutions
- For the rural area, the Onnens site has been selected as the demonstration site. This community of 500 habitants consists mainly of residential customers and will soon host the largest PV plant of Switzerland. This power plant of 8.5 MW will be connected on September 2016 at the extremity of the feeder, approximately 12km from the primary substation, which makes integration of this power into the grid extremely challenging in terms of voltage control and line congestion management. The grid currently consists of 26 MV/LV stations. This site will offer a great opportunity for real life validation of control strategies for future cases of major PV plants integration. PV is the fastest growing renewable energy technology in Switzerland and the number of utility scale installation is expected to increase in the future.
