# Smart Grid Architecture for Rural Distribution Networks: Application to a Spanish Pilot Network
## 1 Introduction  
A stable energy supply is a prerequisite for the social, industrial and commercial development of societies, and therefore any technology that will enhance it will cause a tremendous positive impact [1, 2]. Distribution networks, since coping with 95% of network infrastructure in Europe--and experiencing nearly 90% of all power outages and disturbances of the whole system [3, 4, 5]-- have a key role for the achievement of the above-mentioned goals [6]. The conventional distribution (and transmission) networks were designed so that the electricity generation is often centralized in large scale power plants, away from populated areas [5, 7, 8]. From these generating facilities, the electric power is distributed to consumers thus mostly yielding predictable unidirectional power flows [3, 5]. The above paradigm is rapidly changing by the massive inclusion of renewable and distributed generation, the adoption of an active role by consumers and the emergence of new actors in the fields of the stationary energy storage and electro mobility [3, 9, 10, 11, 12]. Such technological revolution demands a development of new mechanisms for ensuring the flexible, stable and efficient operation of electrical networks and markets (so making the grid smart), and also for their planning and reinforcement in their modernization [9]. For instance, the German EnergyAgency (in German, Deutsche Energie-Agentur) shows in a recent study that the required amount of network reinforcements for the German power grid for the \"Energiewende\" until 2030 entails investments between 27.5 billion E  and 42.5 billion E [13]. Accordingly, the planning of innovative grid update strategies could be translated into massive economic savings in the required network reinforcement costs [10]. Both the scientific community and industry are proposing and adopting different actuations to transform traditional distribution grids into active, Smart Grid ones [3; 7; 9; 10; 14; 15; 16; 17; 18; 19; 20; 21; 22; 23; 24; 25; 26; 27]. In this sense, actuations mainly tackle the exploitation of new communication capabilities and distributed energy resources. All proposals are aligned with the idea of transforming a radial and dumb distribution system into a meshed intelligent one. This transformation focuses mostly on the inclusion of advanced meters, and deploying telecommunications and distributed energy resources that provide new functionalities such as self-healing, high reliability and power quality enhancements. Additionally, other issues such as the cybersecurity, the distributed energy resources integration, the asset utilization optimization, and the minimization of operations and maintenances expenses are also treated. Contributing to such proposals, this paper proposes an innovative grid architecture to transform a real and traditional rural distribution grid into an active and smart one. This architecture relies on exploiting the convergence between electrical and telecommunication networks and this is one of the main contributions of the paper and project [28]. In the management plane of the architecture, the work undertaken aims to show how utilities can operate more efficiently and to interconnect energy between a variety of actors including prosumers, consumers, distributed generation and energy storages, to enable multi-directional power flows [29]. Such power flows are managed by an innovative hierarchical management tool, enabling the optimal operation of the rural grid while both isolated and connected to the main distribution grid. In the power plane of the architecture, power flows are controlled by exploiting the flexibility provided by a variety of wired and wireless communication technologies that helps to cope with geographical restrictions of the rural environment, along with an innovative so called Intelligent Distribution Power Router (IDPR) device.