T07.3 - Enhancing Behind-the-Meter Visibility of Grid Edge PV Systems and Electric Vehicle Charging Loads Through Integration of Compact Low-Cost Sensors

The increasing adoption of solar panels, battery storage, and Electric Vehicle (EV) chargers is driving a paradigm shift in the distribution grid system. However, the lack of visibility into Behind-The-Meter (BTM) Distributed Energy Resources (DER) generation limits the ability to fully leverage DERs as grid assets, hindering efforts to enhance grid reliability, resilience, reduce operational costs, and increase photovoltaic (PV) hosting capacity. By utilizing existing data from distributed inverters, which are already monitored by controllers, it is possible to gain better visibility into BTM PV generation without incurring additional hardware costs. This paper introduces a Power Hardware-in-the-Loop (PHIL) testbed to evaluate the feasibility of the ”virtual inverter sensing node” concept, which enhances BTM visibility by collecting data from commercial PV inverters and micro-Phasor Measurement Units (μPMUs) in a distribution feeder. The study compares the benefits of cloud- based data aggregation with using μPMUs as data aggregators, as demonstrated through experimental testing.