A new electric power network for effective transportation of small power of dispersed generation plants

This paper proposes a new electric power network that makes it possible for many types of dispersed generation plants owned by nonutility organizations to participate in an electric power market without the disadvantages of existing power utility and customers. This power network is called an open electric energy network (OEEN) because the network is open to the many types of plants for the participation. For achieving such openness, electric power storage devices, load controller at each customer and data communication network are installed in OEEN; the flow of excess electric power generated by each plant is controlled autonomously and in a distributed way. That is, the control is done by transmitting the data on excess electric power such as generation and demand point, power quality, price, etc., from each dispersed generation plant to the power storage devices and the load controllers through the communication network. Since this datadriven power flow control is similar to the mail system for a packet with the addresses of sender and receiver, it is called packet electric power transportation. In OEEN the storage device plays a different role from load leveling. Therefore, the way to determine the storage capacity differs from the conventional approach. In this paper, the applicability of queuing theory for determining the capacity is also discussed.