The electric grid is undergoing a massive transformation. Traditional grids are being upgraded to smart grids which use digital technology to detect and react to local changes in usage. The smart grid infrastructure serves as a basis for ongoing research into innovative power delivery. This research has the potential to completely revolutionize how we generate distribute, and use electricity.
What is the Smart Grid?
The smart grid is an intelligent electricity network that uses digital communications technology information systems and automation to improve the efficiency, reliability, and sustainability of electric systems. It is an evolution of the traditional power grid that has been used for decades.
Some key features of the smart grid include:
-
Two-way communication – Information and electricity can flow both ways, between utilities and consumers. This enables more dynamic and responsive grid operations.
-
Sensing and measurement – Sensors throughout the network collect data on electricity flow and infrastructure condition. This provides visibility into grid performance.
-
Advanced controls – Automated systems can rapidly isolate faults, dynamically optimize power flow, integrate renewable energy, and smooth consumption variability.
-
Improved interfaces – Next generation interfaces give consumers more information on their energy usage and tools to manage it.
-
Analytics – Advanced analytics turn the massive amount of grid data into meaningful information to optimize system planning and operations.
Benefits of the Smart Grid
Investments in smart grid technology provide many advantages over traditional grids. Key benefits include:
-
Reliability – Outages can be prevented through predictive maintenance before failures occur. When outages do happen, automated rerouting of power and remote control of substations speeds restoration.
-
Efficiency – Reduced energy losses and optimized asset utilization lowers costs. Voltage optimization ensures optimum energy delivery.
-
Integration of renewables – Smart inverters coupled with grid flexibility enables large-scale renewable energy integration.
-
Empowered consumers – Consumers can better understand energy usage and adjust behaviors to save money. New technologies like rooftop solar, electric vehicles, and home energy storage can participate in grid operations.
-
Safety – Early fault warning, remote asset control, and automated self-healing processes improves worker and public safety.
-
Sustainability – Optimizing energy usage, integrating renewables, and enabling new clean technologies reduces environmental impacts.
Smart Grid Research Areas
The smart grid’s advanced sensing, automation, and communication capabilities provide a platform for researching and testing new technologies before deploying them at scale. Some key areas of innovation enabled by smart grids include:
Renewable Integration
Studying how to seamlessly integrate large amounts of solar, wind, and other renewables onto the grid, while maintaining reliability and resilience. This involves developing forecasting tools, testing smart inverter capabilities, creating virtual power plants, and more.
Distributed Energy Resources (DERs)
Exploring how emerging technologies like rooftop solar, electric vehicles, battery storage, and smart devices can provide grid services and interact beneficially with the grid.
Microgrids
Designing and testing self-sufficient microgrids that can disconnect from the main grid and operate autonomously. This builds grid resilience.
Transactive Energy
Creating market mechanisms and control systems that allow distributed energy resources to dynamically transact services to support grid operations.
Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI)
Leveraging smart meter data to develop new applications for outage management, voltage optimization, load forecasting, and identifying grid issues.
Asset Health Monitoring
Applying advanced pattern recognition and machine learning to equipment sensor data to optimize maintenance and predict failures before they happen.
Dynamic Line Rating
Using real-time sensor data to accurately calculate transmission line ampacity and extract more capacity from existing lines safely and reliably.
Grid Cybersecurity
Developing new cybersecurity technologies tailored to smart grid communication networks, to ensure data integrity and system control against rising cyber threats.
Real-World Examples
Many utilities and research organizations around the world are leveraging smart grid testbeds to advance innovations in power delivery:
-
The European Network of Transmission System Operators for Electricity operates the Grid Innovation Playground with 35 pilot projects experimenting with the latest smart grid technologies.
-
The US Department of Energy funds over 20 smart grid demonstration projects under the Smart Grid Investment Grant program, catalyzing development of new smart grid applications.
-
BC Hydro’s InovGrid on Vancouver Island serves as a live testbed to validate emerging technologies like energy storage, electric vehicle integration, microgrids, and dynamic line rating systems.
-
Duke Energy’s McAlpine Smart Grid Laboratory is a living laboratory focused on distributed energy resource integration and microgrid cybersecurity research.
-
EPRI’s Integrated Grid testbed combines a distribution grid simulator with a virtual integration platform to realistically test new control systems and grid technologies.
These projects test innovations at city and regional levels before expanding successful ones across entire service territories. The knowledge gained in turn accelerates smart grid technology development.
The Path Forward
The smart grid infrastructure lays the technology foundations for continued innovation in power delivery. As more smart grid projects come online, utilities, technology providers, and academic researchers gain more opportunities to test creative approaches to grid modernization. These collaborative efforts will ultimately transform electric grid operations worldwide.
However, realizing the full potential of smart grid-enabled technologies requires sustained investment, stakeholder collaboration, supportive policies, and sharing of research learnings. With concerted effort across the public and private sectors, the smart grid can catalyze a clean and resilient energy future.
Smart grid benefits, strengths
- Intelligent – capable of sensing system overloads and rerouting power to prevent or minimize a potential outage; capable of working autonomously when conditions require resolution faster than humans can respond…and cooperatively in aligning the goals of utilities, consumers, and regulators
- Efficient – capable of meeting increased consumer demand without adding infrastructure
- Accommodating – capable of accepting energy from virtually any fuel source, including solar and wind, as easily and transparently as coal and natural gas; capable of integrating any and all better ideas and technologies—energy storage technologies, for example—as they are market-proven and ready to come online
- Motivating – enabling real-time communication between the consumer and utility so consumers can tailor their energy consumption based on individual preferences, like price and/or environmental concerns
- Opportunistic – creating new opportunities and markets by means of its ability to capitalize on plug-and-play innovation wherever and whenever appropriate
- Quality-focused – capable of delivering the power quality necessary—free of sags, spikes, disturbances, and interruptions—to power our increasingly digital economy and the data centers, computers, and electronics necessary to make it run
- Resilient – increasingly resistant to attack and natural disasters and extreme weather events as it becomes more decentralized and reinforced with smart grid security protocols
- Environment-Friendly – slowing the advance of global climate change and offering a genuine path toward significant decarbonization and environmental improvement.
Applying the smart grid
An automated, widely distributed energy delivery network, the smart grid is capable of monitoring everything from power plants to customer preferences and everything in between. It incorporates into the grid the benefits of distributed computing and communications to deliver real-time information and enable the near-instantaneous balance of supply and demand by providing the capability to manage at the device level.
A smarter grid is a necessity for the future. Take for instance electric vehicles. Enabled by the smart grid, these vehicles will number in the tens of millions by the end of this decade. Additionally, when light electric vehicles (i.e., cars and small trucks) are recharged at night, power plants are better able to meet U.S. electricity needs during times of peak demand in the day. The integrated communications control infrastructure inherent to the smart grid makes handling the load of electric vehicles simple and efficient.
There are numerous other innovative advancements that are dependent on the smart grid. Grid interactive zero-net commercial buildings, equipped with smart grid technologies, help balance energy generation and conservation while helping ensure grid stability. Superconducting power cables reduce line losses and carry exponentially more power. Powered by the smart grid, advanced sensors can monitor and report line conditions in real-time, enabling more power to flow over existing lines and making the grid more efficient.
It’s always been costly and challenging to store electricity at grid-scale but that’s changing quickly. New, long-duration, grid-scale energy storage technologies are being developed (including a new generation of batteries) that can meet the performance and cost requirements for more wide-scale deployment. Energy storage, intelligently controlled through the smart grid, will be critical to bringing more renewable energy resources—such as solar and wind—onto the grid.
Decoded: What is a ‘Smart Grid’ and how does it work?
FAQ
What is the primary purpose of implementing a smart grid?
What is the smart grid concept in power system?
What is the function of the smart grid system?
Why is a smart grid necessary?
Why should smart grid be integrated with energy management system?
Integration of smart grid with energy management system can evaluate complicated power system data, decrease power utilization, and enhance smart grid reliability and effectiveness. In this scenario, urgency for a more effective and efficient way to produce and utilize energy is exhibited.
What is a smart grid?
Through the integration of a bidirectional power and information flow, smart systems, and renewable energy sources, Smart Grids are the next generation of power grids, enabling cooperativity, automation, and efficiency.
What research works are in process for the development of smart grids?
Various research works are in process for the development of smart grids. These ongoing research works focus on different technologies. Some of them are explained in this paper. Energy Management System. It is important to work with all components from production to consumer for a reliable grid.
What is smart grid energy management?
In the smart grid (SG), energy management maintains supply and demand stability while adhering to all system restrictions for cost-effective, dependable, and safe electrical system operation. It also contains optimization, which ensures that power generation costs are reduced.
Could smart grids be a solution to a lack of infrastructure?
These smart grids have a huge potential and could be a solution of reliability of power transmission and distribution in developing countries which lack infrastructure. In US only 20% of the all carbon dioxide is been emitted by transportation while generation of electricity has 40% of the carbon dioxide emitting share in it.
Are smart grid policy implementation methods relevant to the power industry?
Many authors have published their work to examine the regulatory and social issues relating to smart grid development, sustainable development of energy, and advancement in the technologies of smart grids [76 – 79]. Numerous global smart grid policy implementation methods are connected to the power industry .