  Although digitalization of future power grids offer several coordination
incentives, the reliability and security of information and communication
technologies (ICT) hinders its overall performance. In this paper, we introduce
a novel architecture Spike Talk via a unified representation of power and
information as a means of data normalization using spikes for coordinated
control of microgrids. This grid-edge technology allows each distributed energy
resource (DER) to execute decentralized secondary control philosophy
independently by interacting among each other using power flow along the
tie-lines. Inspired from the field of computational neuroscience, Spike Talk
basically builds on a fine-grained parallelism on the information transfer
theory in our brains, particularly when neurons (modeled as DERs) transmit
information (inferred from power streams measurable at each DER) through
synapses (modeled as tie-lines). Not only does Spike Talk simplify and address
the current bottlenecks of the cyber-physical architectural operation by
dismissing the ICT layer, it provides intrinsic operational and cost-effective
opportunities in terms of infrastructure development, computations and
modeling. Hence, this paper provides a pedagogic illustration of the key
concepts and design theories. Since we focus on coordinated control of
microgrids in this paper, the signaling accuracy and system performance is
studied for several neural coding schemes responsible for converting the
real-valued local measurements into spikes.
