Taking an active approach

The development of active management technologies, regulatory arrangements for network operations, and new commercial opportunities emerging from the low-carbon climate change policy, is discussed. Many European countries are integrating distributed generation (DG) by reshaping the existing technical, regulatory, and commercial frameworks to deliver efficient, reliable, and robust networks for the future DG systems. They are developing significant information and communication technology (ICT) capabilities to facilitate interaction between DG systems and the system operators. They are also developing new decision support tools to interpret and act upon the new information presented by integrated DG. The integration of active management enables the operators to maximize the use of the existing circuits by taking full advantage of generator dispatch, control of transformer taps, voltage regulators, reactive power management, and system configuration in an integrated manner.