Low Cost Wireless Sensors for Distribution Grid Intelligence and Resiliency

Extreme weather events have been known to cause massive disruptions in power leading to significant outages in the recent past. The main goal of this study is to improve situation intelligence in the distribution grid to determine the downed lines, impacted areas, location of healthy lines and nodes, and the amount of distributed generation available at customer locations to serve the critical loads (health care facilities, law enforcement, natural gas delivery network, gasoline pumping stations, water distribution facilities, etc.). A multi-tiered wireless sensor network is designed that has the ability to report to the substation with information on the attributes of an outage, including location, possible extent of the outage, and potential use of DER for backup power. An interactive visualization software is developed to display the sensor data.