An Introduction To Smart Grid

Amit Kumar
M.E (2ND Year) Electrical Engineering
PEC University of Technology
Chandigarh (India)
E mail- amitkumar9254@gmail.com

Abstract
The smart grid will deliver electricity from suppliers to
consumers using digital technology to save energy, reduce
cost and increase reliability and transparency. The
realization of the smart grid requires the modernization of
the control system that governs the electricity supply
process. The power grid will be instrumented with
thousands of new digital control devices, sensors, and smart
meters. Although the introduction of these technologies will
bring many benefits to the control of the power networks, it
will add more complexity to the communications. With
introduction of smart grid concept, how to face up to the
impacts of grid-connected renewable energy sources,
especially like wind power on power systems becomes one
of the most important issues in development of smart grid.
In this paper, I will give a brief introduction of Smart Grids.
Keywords smart grid, privacy, challenges, security,
demand response.
I. INTRODUCTION
Currently, the design and size of an electricity supply
network corresponds to the demand observed during peak
periods.
Unfortunately, this leads to an over dimensioned network
for the rest of the off-peak periods. Therefore, one of the
Smart Grids [1] goals are to modify customer behavior
patterns in order to balance the load and reduce peak
electricity demand. A new way to motivate this behavior
shift is to apply tariffs based on the time of usage, setting
different electricity prices for peak and off-peak periods.
Even the simplest pricing mechanism requires information
about the time and volume of electricity consumed by every
customer. For this purpose,
Smart Meters (SMs) will be installed in every household
participating in the Smart Grid. These devices will
periodically measure and temporarily store each customers
consumption data, and then this information will be
transferred to the utility companies through the Advanced
Metering Infrastructure (AMI) [1].

Guided by- Asst. Prof. J. Gambhir

Asst. Professor, Electrical Engineering
PEC University of Technology
Chandigarh (India)
Changing the Smart Grid from a concept to a reality
requires collaboration, integration, and interoperability
between an array of disciplines, including computational
and communications control systems for generation,
transmission, distribution, customer, operations, markets,
and service providers.
Successful Smart Grid professionals must possess
knowledge in several of these disciplines and be able to stay
abreast of recent technological developments, standards,
policies and news items. The numerous sources and rapid
rate of creation of Smart Grid information makes tracking
activities and events while screening for quality
challenging and time consuming.
Further challenging is that filtering this wealth of
information into areas of particular interest is difficult due to
the lack of consistent terminology and classification system.
The backbone of a successful smart grid control system is a
reliable, resilient, and manageable communication
infrastructure that intelligently links the elements of the grid
while participating in the decision making that delivers
value to the utility and supply and demand entities
connected to it.
On the other hand, building the smart grid requires adding
smart sensors over cables, transformers and any other
electricity grid equipment. Homes and buildings will be
equipped with smart meters that can inform the power grid
operators about the electricity usage of consumers.
This sheer number of sensors, smart meters, and control
devices generate a huge amount of data that need to be sent
towards the central control room. However, the transmission
of this control traffic adds more complexity to the
communication infrastructure that supports the smart grid.
This communication network has not been tailored to carry
such amount of information. Thereby, the modernization of
the power grid and the introduction of this new sensors data
traffic might undermine the performance of other control
operations. In this paper, we investigate the utilization of
data aggregation techniques to reduce the communication
overhead resulting from the introduction of new control
devices and sensors. We present two data aggregation
techniques that can be used in power grid control systems to

reduce the communication overhead and spare bandwidth

for other control operations.

Fully enables and is supported by competitive electricity

markets.

II. WHAT IS SMART GRID

Smart Grid is the modernization of the electricity delivery
system so that it monitors, protects and automatically
optimizes the operation of its interconnected elements
from the central and distributed generator through the highvoltage network and distribution system, to industrial users
and building automation systems, to energy storage
installations and to end-use consumers and their
thermostats, electric vehicles, appliances and other
household devices. Smart grid is the integration of
information and communications system into electric
transmission and distribution networks.

IV. Need for Smart Grid in India

With such enormous deficiencies in basic infrastructure,
why would India want to consider investing in smart grid
technologies? Ultimately for India to continue along its path
of aggressive economic growth, it needs to build a modern,
intelligent grid. It is only with a reliable, financially secure
Smart Grid [4] that India can provide a stable environment
for investments in electric infrastructure, a prerequisite to
fixing the fundamental problems with the grid. Without this,
India will not be able to keep pace with the growing
electricity needs of its cornerstone industries, and will fail to
create an environment for growth of its high tech and
telecommunications sectors.

The smart grid [2] delivers electricity to consumers using

two-way digital technology to enable the more efficient
management of consumers end uses of electricity as well as
the more efficient use of the grid to identify and correct
supply demand-imbalances instantaneously and detect faults
in a self-healing process that improves service quality,
enhances reliability, and reduces costs. The emerging vision
of the smart grid encompasses a broad set of applications,
including software, hardware, and technologies that enable
utilities to integrate, interface with, and intelligently control
innovations.
Some of the enabling technologies & business practice that
make smart grid deployments possible include:
Smart Meters
Meter Data Management
Field area networks
Integrated communications systems
Resilience [3]
Data Security
Electricity Storage devices
Demand Response
III. OBJECTIVE OF SMART GRID INITIATIVE FOR
POWER DISTRIBUTION UTILITY IN INDIA
Key objective of Smart Grid
Self-healing: The grid rapidly detects, analyzes, responds,
and restores
Empowers and incorporates the consumer: Ability to
incorporate consumer equipment and behavior in grid
design and operation
Tolerant of attack: The grid mitigates and is resilient to
physical/cyber-attacks
Provides power quality needed by 21st-century users: The
grid provides quality power consistent with consumer and
industry needs
Accommodates a wide variety of supply and demand: The
grid accommodates a variety of resources, including
demand response, combined heat and power, wind,
photovoltaic, and end-use efficiency

V. Demand Response
Smart grid applications allow electricity producers and
customers to communicate [5] with one another and make
decisions about how and when to produce and consume.
Emerging technology will allow customers to shift from an
event-based demand response where the utility requests the
shedding of load, towards a more 24/7-based demand
response where the customer sees incentives for controlling
load at all times. Although this utility-customer dialogue
increases the opportunities for demand response, customers
are still largely influenced by behavioral as well as
economic incentives and any have demonstrated reluctance
to relinquish total control of their assets to utility
companies.
Smart grid applications increase the opportunities [6] for
demand response by providing real-time data to utilities and
consumers, but economic incentives remain the driving
force behind this practice. The foundation for this would
again be having accurate customer profiles with load,
consumption pattern and asset data so as to be able to
evolve customer segmentation and develop business cases
for supporting each of those categories with different plans
and incentives.
VI. PROPERTIES
A. SELF HEALING
Self healing is the capacity of a smart grid to restore
efficiently and automatically power after a power outage.
Given a power distribution network in a faulty state, the self
healing problem consists in finding the sequence of switch
operation to reach the optimal restoration state according to
some specified objective. In the case of smart grids the
complexity of that problem increases because search space
in presence of distributed generation, energy storage and
mobile loads (electric vehicle) varies at each outage
resulting in new initial conditions and set of constraints for
each restoration problem. Power flow is bidirectional,

power supply (energy storage, renewable generation)

changes during the restoration procedure.
B. RESILIENCE ENGINEERING
The concept of resilience engineering concerns an
organizations ability to succeed under varying conditions.
There are four factors, frequently referred to as the four
abilities, or cornerstones, of resilience engineering.
1) Actual: The ability to address the actual is to know what
to do, being able to respond to changes and disturbances in
an effective and flexible matter.
2) Factual: The ability to address the factual is to know what
has happened, being able to learn from past events and
understand correctly what happened and why.
3) Critical: The ability to address the critical is knowing
what to look for, being able to monitor what can be a threat
or cause disturbances in the near future.
4) Potential: The ability to address the potential is to know
what to expect, being able to anticipate developments,
threats or opportunities into the future and imagine how
they can affect the organization through changes or
disruptions. The degree to which an organization is resilient,
is determined by how well all these four abilities are
established and managed. A resilient organization is
prepared for the unprepared.
Resilience engineering provides valuable principles for an
organization that faces unknown changes and threats, just
like the power industry will do when implementing smart
grids.
The threats [7] towards systems change every day; who the
attackers are, which motives they have, what the goals may
be, which vulnerabilities may be exploited; the answers may
be quite different tomorrow. However, there is a large set of
known threats that can be prevented or responded to by
established procedures as well. The preparations and
planning for them need to be done properly; this will also be
the foundation for the abilities of resilience.
Resilience is not a product that can be implemented in a day
or a week. It is an immanent property that can be developed
over time, piece by piece. It is more of a management
philosophy as it touches upon individuals, teams, culture,
and priorities. In order to improve resilience, one should
analyze the organization with respect to each of the four
abilities to see how well each of them is developed. Then
one should work on strengthening the weakest ones. Also,
even though all abilities need to be in place in order for an
organization to be resilient, it is possible to weight each of
them differently. Hence, each organization needs to perform
their own assessments to consider which of the abilities are
more important to them, which of the abilities they need to
be especially attentive to. This also contributes to an
explanation to why the literature gives few answers to how
to build resilience. Individual and specialized planning is
needed when developing resilient organizations.
In spite of the need for individual planning for each
organization, training is a common key factor when it comes
to improving resilience. The more experienced each worker

is in anticipating and responding to incidents, the better

prepared will they be for recognizing and responding to
unexpected events when they occur. All these abilities are
developed through training; by being exposed for a large
variety of possible scenarios one also become better suited
to handle scenarios that differ slightly from what one has
seen before.
Also, by being well trained and feeling experienced, one is
able to focus in an emergency situation and act rationally
instead of panicking.
VII. SMART GRID POWER MARKET
Smart Grid is mentioned based on the advanced
measurement system, and to raise the level of demand side
management, energy efficiency, with the ability to achieve
self-healing power system reliability in order to respond to
natural disasters and terrorist attacks. In addition, the
following aspects of the development will also contribute to
the rapid development of smart grid, that is a) tremendous
pressure on the natural environment; b)requirements of
power system stability; c) the user intelligent optimal
control. The uniqueness of smart grid mainly is the
following two aspects. First, the smart grid will allow
different types of power-generation and energy storage
system access. In the smart grid, the large-scale centralized
power plants, including environment-friendly power, wind
power and large scale solar power plants and advanced
nuclear power plants will continue to play an important role.
Strengthening the construction of the transmission system,
so that, these plants are still able to the long-distance
transmission of large power.
Second, in the smart grid [8], the user will be an integral
part of the power system. To encourage and promote user
participation in the power system operation and
management is another important feature of smart grid. In
the smart grid, and users to create real-time two-way
communication system is the user actively encourage and
facilitate participation in the power system operation and
management of the foundation. Inform users in real time the
cost of their electricity consumption, real-time pricing,
power grid the current situation, plans power of information
and other services [9], while users can also use the
information to develop their own power use options.
VIII. CHALLENGES FOR SMART GRID PROJECT
IMPLEMENTATION IN INDIA
The major hurdles for smart grid project implementation
are:
No proven commercial viability for large-scale smart grid
roll outs
Poor financial health of most state-owned T&D companies

 Low awareness of technological developments in the

utility sector
No coordinated national road map for smart grid
Deployment
IX. POTENTIAL BENEFIT OF SMART GRID
INITIATIVE
IN INDIA
The smart grid promises to change the power industrys
entire business model and its relationship with all
stakeholders, involving and affecting utilities, regulators,
energy service providers, technology and automation
vendors, and all consumers of electric power.
The smart grid envisages providing choices to every
customer and enabling them to control the timing and
amount of power they consume based upon the price of the
power at a particular moment of time.
Some basic benefits of a smart grid are:
Peak load reduction:
Self-healing [10]:
A smart grid automatically detects and responds to routine
problems and quickly recovers, minimizing downtime and
financial loss.
Consumer motivation:
Smart grids give consumers visibility into pricing offers an
opportunity to control usage
Improved power quality. A smart grid [11] helps provide
power free of sags, spikes, disturbances and interruptions.
Accommodation of all generation and storage [12] options:
Enables interconnection to distributed sources of power
and storage
Optimized assets and operating efficiently:
Lowers need for construction of new infrastructure and
enables sale of more power through existing system.
However in nutshell following are the direct benefits to
power utility as well as to consumer in India:
Reduced generation operation costs
Deferred generation capital investments
Reduced ancillary service cost
Deferred transmission capital investments
Deferred distribution capital investments
Reduced equipment failures
Reduced distribution maintenance costs
Reduced distribution operations costs
Reduced electricity theft
Reduced electricity losses
Reduced electricity cost to consumers
Reduced major outages
Reduced restoration costs
Reduced momentary outages
Reduced, SOx, NOx emission
X. SECURITY, TRUST AND PRIVACY

The future smart grid will be information driven and rely on

services to empower the interactions among its stakeholders
at multiple layers. This calls for open information exchange
that considers issues such as interoperability, security, trust
and privacy.
Considering the advances in the networked embedded
device domain, their newly acquired capabilities as well as
their expected prevalence, key questions arise with respect
to the security, trust and privacy issues. Security [13] is
difficult to be done correctly, as it is a process coupled with
risk management, depending on the scenario. In the Cloud
of Things era, it is expected that state of the art security
approaches can be applied at the cloud, as well as at the
device level. However, as these are expected now to host
more general purpose operating systems and services, the
need to evolve over time to tackle attacks made against
them is coming to the foreground. Most of these are typical
cyber-physical systems [14], and potential misuse, will have
an impact on the physical world. In the mildest scenarios,
smart meters may report less energy used, and hence
economic fraud. However in other scenarios, the hardware
relevant limits set by the manufacturers might be
overridden, and machines might misbehave or cause
calamities e.g. overheating, malfunctioning etc. As such,
secure lifecycle management of cyber-physical systems,
especially associated with critical infrastructures will gain
importance, and will be challenging.
Designing and developing secure, reliable and resilient
software for such complex systems, especially if they are
not to operate standalone but as part of larger ecosystems as
envisioned in the smart grid is hard.
Although the devices may be secure, questions will arise
on the degree of trust we place upon them, their providers
and operators, as well as on the data they produce. The same
will hold true for the services that they have to cooperate
with, as well as the services that will depend on them. Trust
on the infrastructure, its data and services will be of key
importance.
Hence, a grant challenge would be to not only secure the
devices but establish the full path of trust from data
acquisition to consumption in the Cloud of Things as well as
the appropriate risk assessment for the area.
Finally, privacy is a key aspect; the fear is that high
resolution of data may reveal information about the private
sphere of its producers i.e. the residents in the house. It will
be difficult to enable adequate measures 2019 to manage
this information in a privacy-preserving manner.
Additionally there is no guarantee, that even if this is done
at device, smart house [15] or at even higher levels, that
new method will not be able to extract privacy-related
information from big data sets. Although methods have been
proposed before, e.g. computing with encrypted data, the
right balance needs to be found between privacy, security
and value added services in order not to hamper the smart
grid innovations but still protect all stakeholders [16].

XI. CONCLUSION
This paper discusses about the introduction of smart grid,
need, demand response, properties, challenges and benefits.
The paper discusses the need for smart grid technology.
Finally elaborate the benefits, will achieve through
successful implementation of smart grid for the utilities as
well for the consumers.
(1) Smart grid will integrate, transmit and connect clean
energy and therefore provide a green platform for high
efficiency, energy-saving equipments. It will play a pivotal
role in securing energy safety, optimize energy structure,
improving efficiency, reducing emission and combating
climate change.
(2) Strong and smart grid is a comprehensive and necessary
choice for developing power grid in India.
(3) Coordinated development of strong and smart grid
covers four sides. Firstly, coordination of physical power
grid and smart technology application. Secondly,
coordination of physical power grid and smart technology
application. Thirdly, coordinated development among
generation, transmission, distribution, consumption and
dispatching. Lastly, coordination of smart grid and emerging
industry.
(4) To realize the coordination of strong and smart grid,
work must be done from several sides, power grid structure,
information system, business converge. Unified planning,
unified construction, unified standard must be followed.

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