The term ‘resilience’ means the ability to prepare for and adapt to changing conditions and to withstand and recover rapidly from disruptions. Active Distribution grids can provide support to System Resilience in both aspects, more specifically to help system recovery and provide the necessary flexibility to adapt to changing conditions. In recent years electricity distribution grids have been required to integrate large amounts of Distributed Renewable Energy Sources (DRES) and this has put further importance on the ability of the system to react in real-time to respond to undesired scenarios and avoid potential risks.

There are many consequences to DRES integration that, while contributing towards clean energy and achieving the European emissions targets, may compromise the reliability of the electrical distribution system. These include: power quality, faults, unpredictability and increased variability of load and generation profiles, security of supply, etc. In most of cases, the problem appears as a violation of the voltage limits and grid congestion issues.

Numerous Smart Grid solutions have been developed to address some of these resiliency challenges and to avoid disruptions to the grid. IGREENGrid is a European research project, focused on DRES integration issues. It analyses, using six successful large scale demonstration projects and the practical implementations of Smart Grid solutions.