SMART GRID

Abstract:
A smart grid is a digitally enabled electrical grid that gathers, distributes, and acts on information about the behavior of all participants (suppliers and consumers) in order to improve the efficiency, importance, reliability, economics, and sustainability of electricity services. Smart grid policy is organized in Europe as Smart Grid European Technology Platform. The power grid is aging and congested and faces new challenges and stresses that put at risk its ability to reliably deliver power to an economy that is increasingly dependent on electricity. A growing recognition of the need to modernize

the grid to meet tomorrows challenges has found articulation in the vision of a Smart Grid. The essence of this vision is a fully-automated power delivery network that can ensure a two-way flow of electricity and information between the power plants and appliances and all points in between. The three key technological components of the Smart Grid are distributed intelligence, broadband communications and automated control systems. Focusing in on the role of broadband communications in enabling the Smart Grid, this paper lays out the key communications system requirements and explains how the GridCom network architecture, leveraging Tropos wireless broadband products and technology, enables the Smart Grid of the future.

History:
Today's alternating current power grid evolved after 1896, based in part on Nikola Tesla's design published in 1888 (see War of Currents). Many implementation decisions that are still in use today were made for the first time using the limited emerging technology available 120 years ago. Specific obsolete power grid assumptions and features (like centralized unidirectional electric power transmission, electricity distribution, and demand-driven control) represent a vision of what was thought possible in the 19th century. Part of this is due to an institutional risk aversion that utilities naturally feel regarding use of untested technologies on a critical infrastructure they have been charged with maintaining. The 20th century power grids were originally built out as local grids which, over time, became interwoven for economic and reliability purposes. One of the largest engineered systems ever constructed, the mature, interconnected electric grid of the late 1960s became conceived of as "dividing and distributing" electric power, on a bulk basis, from a relatively small number (i.e., ~thousands) of "central plant" generating stations, to major load centers, and from there to a large number of individual consumers, large and small. The nature of generating technologies available over the first three-quarters of the 20th century lent themselves to both notable efficiencies of scale (individual plants of 1000-3000 MW were not uncommon) and to situational-specific locations (hydroelectric

plants at high dams, coal-, gas-, and oil-fired plants near supply lines, nuclear plants near supplies of cooling water, and all of them, for a variety of reasons, as far away from population centers as economically possible). As the electric power industry continued to produce ever more-affordable electric power to an ever-increasing base of customers, by the late 1960s it had reached nearly every home and business in the developed world. [References pending] However, the data-collecting and processing capabilities of the era required broadly averaged, statistical rate classifications that severely limited the timely propagation of supply and demand price signals through the system. At the same time, increasing environmental concerns and increasing sociopolitical dependence on electrification combined to limit further economies of scale. By the end of the 20th century, the cost escalation of electric power in major metropolitan areas was considered untenable, and technologies that would remain recognizable to the founders of the industry from a century earlier were no longer considered adequate to an informationand services-based economy.

First cities with smart grids :

The earliest, and still largest, example of a smart grid is the Italian system installed by Enel S.p.A. of Italy. Completed in 2005, the Telegestore project was highly unusual in the utility world because the company designed and manufactured their own meters, acted as their own system integrator, and developed their own system software. The Telegestore project is widely regarded as the first commercial scale use of smart grid technology to the home, and delivers annual savings of 500 million euro at a project cost of 2.1 billion euro.

In the US, the city of Austin, Texas has been working on building its smart grid since 2003, when its utility first replaced 1/3 of its manual meters with smart meters that communicate via a wireless mesh network. It currently manages 200,000 devices real-time (smart meters, smart thermostats, and sensors across its service area), and expects to be supporting 500,000 devices real-time in 2009 servicing 1 million consumers and 43,000 businesses. Boulder, Colorado completed the first phase of its smart grid project in August 2008. Both systems use the smart meter as a gateway to the home automation network (HAN) that controls smart sockets and devices. Some HAN designers favor decoupling control functions from the meter, out of concern of future mismatches with new standards and technologies available from the fast moving business segment of home electronic devices. Hydro One, in Ontario, Canada is in the midst of a large-scale Smart Grid initiative, deploying a standards-compliant communications infrastructure from Trillionth. By the end of 2010, the system will serve 1.3 million customers in the province of Ontario. The initiative won the "Best AMR Initiative in North America" award from the Utility Planning Network. The City of Mannheim in Germany is using real time Broadband Power line (BPL) communications in its Model City Mannheim "MoMa" project. InovGrid is an innovative project in Evora that aims to equip the electricity grid with information and devices to automate grid management, improve service quality, reduce operating costs, promote energy efficiency and environmental sustainability, and increase the penetration of renewable

energies and electric vehicles. It will be possible to control and manage the state of the entire electricity distribution grid at any given instant, allowing suppliers and energy services companies to use this technological platform to offer consumers information and added-value energy products and services. This project to install an intelligent energy grid places Portugal and EDP at the cutting edge of technological innovation and service provision in Europe.

Goals of the smart grid:

Latency of the data flow is a major concern, with some early smart meter architectures allowing actually as long as 24 hours delay in receiving the data, preventing any possible reaction by either supplying or demanding devices. Smart energy demand describes the energy user component of the smart grid. It goes beyond and means much more than even energy efficiency and demand response combined. Smart energy demand is what delivers the majority of smart meter and smart grid benefits. Smart energy demand is a broad concept. It includes any energy-user actions to:

Enhancement of reliability reduce peak demand, shift usage to off-peak hours, lower total energy consumption, actively manage electric vehicle charging, actively manage other usage to respond to solar, wind, and other renewable resources

buy more efficient appliances and equipment over time based on a better understanding of how energy is used by each appliance or item of equipment.

All of these actions minimize adverse impacts on electricity grids and maximize utility and, as a result, consumer savings. Smart Energy Demand mechanisms and tactics include:

smart meters, dynamic pricing, smart thermostats and smart appliances, automated control of equipment, real-time and next day energy information feedback to electricity users, usage by appliance data scheduling and control of loads such as electric vehicle chargers, home area networks (HANs), and others.