Planned Communities (PC) are a residential concept which aims to decongest the population growth out of the city centers, thus catering for the relief of urban environments and the reduction of pollution in major cities. The PCs, as medium- or high-voltage end-customers, which will be sited remotely from what are sought to be traditional load centers, may suffer from reliability concerns (interruptions and black-outs). Additionally, in a de-regulated energy market, they will have to pay higher prices, due to transmission losses and network costs for the required system infrastructure connecting them to the grid.

Installation of distributed energy resources and the application of microgrid (MG) philosophies and algorithms can offer a considerable advantage to this concept. In addition, since PCs are bespoke developments, a MG structure could be introduced from the design phase, integrated with the philosophy of the whole PC project. During this talk, we will, first, discuss the validity of the value proposition of the overall concept, while noting what types and sizes of resources can serve the challenges in the path to application. Following, a control topology that can realize the optimal PC MG operation based on the most widely available and readily accessible resources will be presented.

Dr. Panayiotis (Panos) Moutis, is a Systems Scientist at the Scott Institute for Energy Innovation at Carnegie Mellon University, USA, since August 2018, following his appointment as a postdoctoral research associate at the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (Feb. 2016) at the same University. In 2014, he was awarded a fellowship by Arup, UK (through the University of Greenwich), on the “Research Challenge of Balancing Urban Microgrids in Future Planned Communities”, whereas in 2013 he won the “IEEE Sustainability 360^o Contest” on the topic of Power. Between 2007 and 2015, as part of the research group SmartRUE, Greece, he contributed in over a dozen R&D projects funded by the European Commission.

Moutis received both his diploma (2007) and his PhD (2015) degrees in Electrical & Computer Engineering at the National Technical University of Athens, Greece. He has published more than 20 papers, contributed to 2 book chapters and has accumulated over 10 years of experience as a technical consultant on projects of Renewable Energy Sources and Energy Efficiency. He is the CTO of Proterima Energy Consultants, Greece, and technology advisor to Zeal (ex EVE Energy), USA, an electric vehicle charging platform and infrastructure start-up. He is a senior member of multiple IEEE societies, task-group chair in two IEEE standards working groups, Chair of the IEEE Smart Grid Publications Committee, Editor-in-Chief of the “IEEE Smart Grid Newsletter”, and has served as the Editor-in-Chief of the “IEEE Smart Grid Compendium of Journal Publications, vol. 1”.

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