Smart Grid Systems and Technologies

This mandatory, non-credit day-long seminar will be taken at the start of the program, within the first term of studies. The seminar will provide students with the tools and techniques to engage in applied research activities leading to the discovery solutions to real-world problems using case studies and examples of applied research projects. A portion of the day will be dedicated to a workshop in which students develop a preliminary plan for an applied research project defined by the instructor, then present their plan to the rest of the group. The content introduced in this seminar will be reinforced throughout the taught-course stage of the program as students will be required to complete several team-based and independent mini-projects in each course throughout the program.
Prerequisite(s):

• No prerequisites are required for this course.

This course introduces students to basic concepts involved in smart grid systems and discusses its constituent components. These components will be explored through study of smart grid architectures, technologies, and applications in the form of case-studies. Standards for automation and communication in modern electric utility systems will also be introduced and applied to the development of a modern grid architecture. This foundational knowledge will be used to support topics explored in courses throughout the program. Theoretical content in the course will be supported by site visits which will make use of BCIT’s smart microgrid as a living-laboratory and demonstration centre. In this initial introductory course, students will begin to work on the overarching project which ties together all courses in the program: the implementation of a smart microgrid from start to finish. In this course students will form teams to focus on the development of a high-level architecture (both hardware and communications) of their smart microgrid using the concepts from the course. This architecture will be referenced and updated throughout the remainder of the program. This team-based project will require students to work collaboratively to develop a report which demonstrates and documents the resulting architecture.
Prerequisite(s):

• No prerequisites are required for this course.

The primary aim of this course will be to introduce students to energy trading as well as commercial (economic and management) factors seen in traditional power systems. This will lead to a discussion of how to apply or adapt those techniques to modern grids which utilize smart grid technologies. Content introduced in this course will be applied further throughout the program and as part of the final project. The theory introduced will be supported with real-world case studies sourced from industry. This course will be offered entirely online and does not have a hands-on laboratory component however there will be a significant independent project component in the course. This project work will be part of the overarching project component of the program. As part of this course, students will be required to form costing, management, short- and long-term operational plans for their smart microgrid. This plan will be used to form the commercial portion of the proposal for the planned smart microgrid being proposed and implemented. The proposal will be developed for a non-specialist audience in order to exercise the students’ ability to communicate with other stakeholders in projects of this nature. This commercial proposal will form part of the students’ portfolio for the program.
Prerequisite(s):

• No prerequisites are required for this course.

This course provides an overview of the key enabling technologies available in the development of smart homes for individuals and smart cities for the collective population. This includes the adoption of sustainable or “clean” transportation technologies including their integration into urban environments and their role in sustainable development. Students will gain an understanding of how these technologies can be used to improve the operation of cities and individual homes by influencing factors such as energy efficiency, demand-management, and through enabling automation. BCIT’s campuses and the surrounding municipalities will be used as living laboratories to demonstrate the implementation of smart city technologies and sustainable transportation or to identify where these technologies might have a significant impact. In this course, students will work in teams to describe in detail the impact of the implementation of the smart microgrid being designed throughout the program will have on an associated community. This will be a teambased project that will require members to consider different aspects (good or bad) which come from the implementation of the smart microgrid, including the wide-adoption of modern loads such as: smart buildings with energy management and load-leveling technologies; electric transportation and the associated charging systems; and the ubiquitous use of demand-side management by the electric utility or operator.
Prerequisite(s):

• No prerequisites are required for this course.

This course will provide students with a working knowledge of the fundamentals of interconnected power systems design, operation and control. The course starts with an introduction to power systems followed by a brief review of single-phase and three-phase AC circuits. The main elements of power systems, such as transformers, generators, and distribution and transmission lines will be studied and modeled in detail. Knowledge of these individual elements will then allow students to study the flow of active and reactive power within an interconnected power system. The course continues with symmetrical components and their application in unbalanced power systems as well as fault-analysis. Finally, power system operation, control and stability will be studied. Case studies, laboratories and a project component are also included in the course to reinforce the theoretical concepts being introduced. The course includes a team-based project component relating to the implementation of a smart microgrid. Each team member will consider a different aspect of the interconnection of this smart microgrid to the utility by performing the appropriate analysis and making use of relevant standards. The project will also include an impact study which will detail how the microgrid will affect the interconnected utility with respect to small signal stability, voltage stability, transient stability, power quality, and protection coordination.
Prerequisite(s):

• No prerequisites are required for this course.

This course follows from the introductory smart grid courses to offer an in depth look at information sources and communications architectures seen in supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) or distributed communications systems. Students will gain an understanding of the hardware, software and communications protocols involved in modern electric utility applications. The course will also identify and address issues relating cybersecurity and propose solutions for mitigating these challenges. An overview of the sections of IEC61850 relating to communications will be provided, and students will have a chance to apply these standards to their work. The theory presented in this course will be supported by real-world case studies and a significant hands-on laboratory component. Students will contribute to their portfolio of work in this course by participating in a team-based project which will involve the design of a communications system architecture and a selection of hardware for the smart microgrid being considered throughout the program. The design should enable interaction between individual elements within the smart microgrid as well as communication with the utility and will be required to demonstrate compliance with the appropriate sections of the IEC 61850 standard. Students should also make use of the NIST framework for improving critical infrastructure cybersecurity as well as the NERC CIP standard to ensure that their smart microgrid system will not be vulnerable to common issues.
Prerequisite(s):

• 60% in SGST 9110

​The course builds on the fundamentals of three-phase power system (learned from the prerequisite courses) and teaches a practical approach to power system protection. It begins by introducing how the modern power grid is shifting from centralized to distributed generation architecture, key elements of a protection system, construction of a modern microprocessor-based relay and attributes of a reliable protection system. It then gives a brief overview of short circuit analysis, which is being covered in detail in a concurrent course. The course discusses characteristics of the modern inverter-based generators (wind, solar and battery resources) and how they differ from conventional synchronous generators (thermal and hydro electric generators). The distribution system grounding, which significantly influences protection requirements, is discussed in detail. It covers in-depth protection practices used in the traditional distribution system. New protection practices are discussed to accommodate distributed generation and its operation with the consumers as a microgrid. The course uses operational experiences from installed distributed generator resources and microgrids and relates them to the protection practices introduced in the course. ​The course laboratory exercises involves hands-on experience with a CT (current transformer) saturation simulator and industry standard short circuit simulation programs.
Prerequisite(s):

• 60% in SGST 9110

This mandatory day-long seminar will be taken towards the end of course-component of the program, i.e., during Term 3 or afterwards, once students have an idea of what they will be working on during the project phase of this graduate program. The primary goal is to prepare students to focus on an applied research problem and publish or present their results. The seminar will include a workshop component in which the student begins to plan for their own project proposal by developing a preliminary document, to be presented to the instructor and peers for immediate feedback. Following the seminar, students will work to develop a formal proposal for their independent industry or applied research project, to be reviewed by the project evaluation panel formed by the supervisor.
Prerequisite(s):

• No prerequisites are required for this course.

The course builds upon the fundamental concepts from previous courses to provide details of microgrid design, operation, protection and control in both grid-connected and islanded (independent) modes of operation. The economic and environmental impact of microgrids will also be studied, offering students a basis for comparison with conventional approaches to distribution system implementation and planning. Furthermore, an overview of relevant standards which govern the safe operation of microgrids will be provided and students will be required to apply these standards in their work. The theoretical content will be reinforced with real-world case studies and laboratory sessions which involve implementation on a small-scale microgrid. Selected topics in emerging areas, such as the development of DC microgrids, or volt-var optimization (VVO) will also be presented in each iteration of the course. As a contribution to the student’s portfolio of work developed throughout the program, an individual project component will be included in this course. In this project students will be required to design and implement a feature or aspect of a microgrid EMS. Projects could include the development of a module which enables load or generation forecasting; enables new energy trading techniques for small-scale transactional markets; achieves optimal dispatch of renewable distributed energy resources or other applications of numerical analysis. Students will be required to demonstrate and develop a report which provides details of their project.
Prerequisite(s):

• 60% in SGST 9110 and 60% in SGST 9210 and 60% in SGST 9230

This course will explore the details of renewable energy technologies that have the most potential for use in British Columbia, including: wind farms and turbines (with a focus on Type 3 and 4 turbines); micro-hydro and tidal power devices and systems; photovoltaic devices, solar farms and solar-storage hydro systems; and, biomass generation. For each of these technologies, students will be exposed to detailed design, modeling, operation and control aspects associated with that technology. The theory in the course will be supported by case studies sourced from industry, as well as a laboratory component which allows for hands-on exposure to these technologies will be included in the course. The course will also include a ‘selected topics’ module which will be updated frequently as advancements are made in the area of renewable energy. In addition to the details of the individual technologies, issues and mitigation of issues involved with the integration into the electric utility grid will also be covered. In doing so, students will gain familiarity with the technical, economic and social issues surrounding the integration of renewable resources. These topics will enable students to propose a renewable energy system design suitable for interconnection to the electric utility grid. To contribute to their portfolio of work in SGST, this course will involve an individual project requiring students to select appropriate renewable energy technology and design a renewable energy system suitable for interconnection to the smart microgrid being designed as students progress through the program. Students will develop a report which demonstrates and documents the results of their project.
Prerequisite(s):

• 60% in SGST 9110 and 60% in SGST 9210 and 60% in SGST 9230

This course follows up on the information and communications technology in electric utilities course, now exploring in detail the operation of physical devices (sensors) used for data acquisition. This includes devices and protocols for wide-area measurement using data from phasor measurement units (PMUs or Synchrophasors) or advanced metering infrastructure (AMI). Such systems will be contrasted with local measurements within a substation, such as modern current transformers, voltage transformers and merging units utilizing sampled measured values (SMV). Applications of industrial Internet of Things (IoT) and wireless mesh networking in electric utilities will also be explored. Once the data is collected, it must be analyzed and abstracted for visualization for the purpose of short- and long-term planning or operations. Various approaches to “big data” analytics will be explored, along with an overview of methods used for visualization (abstraction) of such data. Case studies and data relating to smart metering and processing of that smart metering data within the smart microgrid at BCIT will be used to support the theoretical content introduced, along with supervised laboratory sessions. To contribute to their portfolio of work in SGST, students will work on an individual project within this course. As part of this project, students will be required to specify data acquisition hardware suitable for implementation in their smart microgrid and verify through testing. They will then implement a system for processing, abstraction and visualization of this data in a manner useful for those operating or controlling the microgrid locally.
Prerequisite(s):

• 60% in SGST 9210 and 60% in SGST 9220

This course includes a detailed look at power electronics and energy storage, which are key elements of smart grid systems and technologies. This course will build the skills and knowledge required to make use of these technologies in grid-connected applications. The emphasis on the power-electronics portion of the course will be on systems-integration of power conversion “building blocks”, including DC-DC, DC-AC, and AC-DC converters. The focus of this course will be on gridconnected applications of power electronics, which includes the interfacing of distributed energy resources (DERs) such as renewables and energy storage systems (ESS) to the power grid; or, power quality and power flow improvements using power electronic devices. Despite the focus on systems-integration, the course will also introduce students to key details of each building block including: the selection of semiconductor devices; selection and modeling of low-level converter topologies; electromagnetic compatibility issues; commonly used communications protocols for devices as well as high- and low-level power electronics control systems. Basic control theory will also be introduced to allow students to implement high and low-level converter control schemes on digital platforms. The energy storage portion of the course will introduce students to available energy storage technologies including but not limited to pumped storage, various battery (electrochemical) technologies, fuel-cells and flywheels. Greater focus will be given to electrochemical energy storage and the corresponding battery management systems which are necessary for their operation. The theory will be supported by case studies, and the course will include a ‘selected topics’ module which will be updated frequently as advancements are made in the area of power electronics and energy storage. To contribute to their portfolio of work in SGST, this course will involve an individual project requiring students to design a power conversion or energy storage system to enhance the smart microgrid implementation under consideration throughout the program. This may include the implementation of a system or device which corrects power quality issues and load imbalances in a power system, or an energy storage system which improves the load-characteristics of a utility interconnection through load-leveling. If pre-requisite knowledge is sufficient, students may undertake a low-level design project such as a converter build-project or battery management system development. Students will develop a report which demonstrates and documents the results of their project.
Prerequisite(s):

• 60% in SGST 9110 and 60% in SGST 9210

This course involves the students undertaking an independent applied research project conducted on the BCIT campus or carrying out an applied research project developed in conjunction with an industrial partner. The project should provide a solution to a problem posed by society or industry and related to SGST. It will be conducted on the BCIT Burnaby campus and using the campus facilities or at the industrial partner’s premises. The project proposal will be developed independently by the student with assistance by the designated faculty supervisor and industry sponsor (when applicable). The project should be of relevance to SGST, and the scope should be sufficient to demonstration of the student’s ability to transfer knowledge of SGST in a practical setting. Once the student has prepared a proposal for their project a panel will be formed and will review/evaluate the proposal. The same panel will assemble after the student has completed in order to evaluate the final project report and defense. The objectives and deliverables for a given project will be outlined in the project proposal developed by the student in consultation with their faculty supervisor and industry sponsor (when applicable). Interim deliverables will be evaluated by the faculty supervisor to determine progress, ensure the student is on track, and provide feedback. Deliverables common to every project will be a final report outlining the project and results, and a formal defense of these results. This report will be evaluated according to criteria established by the project evaluation panel when meeting initially to approve the project proposal.
Prerequisite(s):

• Any 3 of SGST 9310, SGST 9320, SGST 9330, SGST 9340, SGST 9010, or SGST 9020

This course provides the opportunity to individual students to pursue and extend their knowledge and expertise in a specific subject related to emerging technologies and their applications in smart grid. The nature and scope of each individual directed studies project and its expected deliverable is either suggested by a student, industry or faculty and should be approved by a prospective faculty supervisor in consultation with the program head before the start of the course. A student’s individual directed studies project is carried out under the supervision and guidance of a faculty member. The aim of this course is to strengthen the applied nature of the program by covering the most pertinent smart grid technologies which the industry is focusing on at a given point in time. The course topic can cover some of the diverse areas of smart grid such as Utility Regulation & Governance, Energy Trading & Transactional Markets, Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI), Substation Automation and Cyber/Physical Security, Energy Management Systems, Protection and Control and Distribution Management Systems.
Prerequisite(s):

• Any 3 of SGST 9310, SGST 9320, SGST 9330 or SGST 9340