Upgrading the Power Grid Functionalities with Broadband Power Line Communications: Basis, Applications, Current Trends and Challenges.

This article reviews the basis and the main aspects of the recent evolution of Broadband Power Line Communications (BB-PLC or, more commonly, BPL) technologies. The article starts describing the organizations and alliances involved in the development and evolution of BPL systems, as well as the standardization institutions working on PLC technologies. Then, a short description of the technical foundation of the recent proposed technologies and a comparison of the main specifications are presented; the regulatory activities related to the limits of emissions and immunity are also addressed. Finally, some representative applications of BPL and some selected use cases enabled by these technologies are summarized, together with the main challenges to be faced.

Simplified formulae for the estimation of offshore wind turbines clutter on marine radars.

The potential impact that offshore wind farms may cause on nearby marine radars should be considered before the wind farm is installed. Strong radar echoes from the turbines may degrade radars' detection capability in the area around the wind farm. Although conventional computational methods provide accurate results of scattering by wind turbines, they are not directly implementable in software tools that can be used to conduct the impact studies. This paper proposes a simple model to assess the clutter that wind turbines may generate on marine radars. This method can be easily implemented in the system modeling software tools for the impact analysis of a wind farm in a real scenario.