Exciting yet challenging times lie ahead. The electrical power industry is undergoing rapid change. The rising cost of energy, the mass electrification of everyday life, and climate change are the major drivers that will determine the speed at which such transformations will occur. Regardless of how quickly various utilities embrace smart grid concepts, technologies, and systems, they all agree onthe inevitability of this massive transformation. It is a move that will not only affect their business processes but also their organization and technologies.

The path of the smart grid

Most of the existing demand-side management programs focus primarily on the interactions between a utility company and its customers/users. In this paper, we present an autonomous and distributed demand-side energy management system among users that takes advantage of a two-way digital communication infrastructure which is envisioned in the future smart grid. We use game theory and formulate an energy consumption scheduling game, where the players are the users and their strategies are the daily schedules of their household appliances and loads. It is assumed that the utility company can adopt adequate pricing tariffs that differentiate the energy usage in time and level. We show that for a common scenario, with a single utility company serving multiple customers, the global optimal performance in terms of minimizing the energy costs is achieved at the Nash equilibrium of the formulated energy consumption scheduling game. The proposed distributed demand-side energy management strategy requires each user to simply apply its best response strategy to the current total load and tariffs in the power distribution system. The users can maintain privacy and do not need to reveal the details on their energy consumption schedules to other users. We also show that users will have the incentives to participate in the energy consumption scheduling game and subscribing to such services. Simulation results confirm that the proposed approach can reduce the peak-to-average ratio of the total energy demand, the total energy costs, as well as each user's individual daily electricity charges.

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Autonomous Demand-Side Management Based on Game-Theoretic Energy Consumption Scheduling for the Future Smart Grid

The smart grid is conceived of as an electric grid that can deliver electricity in a controlled, smart way from points of generation to active consumers. Demand response (DR), by promoting the interaction and responsiveness of the customers, may offer a broad range of potential benefits on system operation and expansion and on market efficiency. Moreover, by improving the reliability of the power system and, in the long term, lowering peak demand, DR reduces overall plant and capital cost investments and postpones the need for network upgrades. In this paper a survey of DR potentials and benefits in smart grids is presented. Innovative enabling technologies and systems, such as smart meters, energy controllers, communication systems, decisive to facilitate the coordination of efficiency and DR in a smart grid, are described and discussed with reference to real industrial case studies and research projects.

Demand response and smart grids—A survey

The collaborative and low-cost nature of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) brings significant advantages over traditional communication technologies used in today's electric power systems. Recently, WSNs have been widely recognized as a promising technology that can enhance various aspects of today's electric power systems, including generation, delivery, and utilization, making them a vital component of the next-generation electric power system, the smart grid. However, harsh and complex electric-power-system environments pose great challenges in the reliability of WSN communications in smart-grid applications. This paper starts with an overview of the application of WSNs for electric power systems along with their opportunities and challenges and opens up future work in many unexploited research areas in diverse smart-grid applications. Then, it presents a comprehensive experimental study on the statistical characterization of the wireless channel in different electric-power-system environments, including a 500-kV substation, an industrial power control room, and an underground network transformer vault. Field tests have been performed on IEEE 802.15.4-compliant wireless sensor nodes in real-world power delivery and distribution systems to measure background noise, channel characteristics, and attenuation in the 2.4-GHz frequency band. Overall, the empirical measurements and experimental results provide valuable insights about IEEE 802.15.4-compliant sensor network platforms and guide design decisions and tradeoffs for WSN-based smart-grid applications.

/pdf/opportunities-and-challenges-of-wireless-sensor-networks-in-2px4ztn9v2.pdf

Opportunities and Challenges of Wireless Sensor Networks in Smart Grid

A communication infrastructure is an essential part to the success of the emerging smart grid. A scalable and pervasive communication infrastructure is crucial in both construction and operation of a smart grid. In this paper, we present the background and motivation of communication infrastructures in smart grid systems. We also summarize major requirements that smart grid communications must meet. From the experience of several industrial trials on smart grid with communication infrastructures, we expect that the traditional carbon fuel based power plants can cooperate with emerging distributed renewable energy such as wind, solar, etc, to reduce the carbon fuel consumption and consequent green house gas such as carbon dioxide emission. The consumers can minimize their expense on energy by adjusting their intelligent home appliance operations to avoid the peak hours and utilize the renewable energy instead. We further explore the challenges for a communication infrastructure as the part of a complex smart grid system. Since a smart grid system might have over millions of consumers and devices, the demand of its reliability and security is extremely critical. Through a communication infrastructure, a smart grid can improve power reliability and quality to eliminate electricity blackout. Security is a challenging issue since the on-going smart grid systems facing increasing vulnerabilities as more and more automation, remote monitoring/controlling and supervision entities are interconnected.

https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1315&context=electricalengineeringfacpub

A Survey on Smart Grid CommunicationInfrastructures: Motivations, Requirements andChallenges

In this article, we present the security, agility, and robustness/survivability of a large-scale power delivery infrastructure that faces new threats and unanticipated conditions. By way of background, we present a brief overview of the past work on the challenges faced in online parameter estimation and real-time adaptive control of a damaged F-15 aircraft. This work, in part, provided the inspiration and laid the foundation in the 1990s for the flight testing of a fast parameter estimation/modeling and reconfigurable aircraft control system that allowed the F-15 to become self-healing in the face of damaged equipment.

Toward a smart grid: power delivery for the 21st century

https://isiarticles.com/bundles/Article/pre/pdf/9791.pdf

Smart grid: Overview, issues and opportunities. Advances and challenges in sensing, modeling, simulation, optimization and control

The North American power delivery system: Balancing market restructuring and environmental economics with infrastructure security

As energy infrastructure is upgraded to meet modern digital society's need for secure and high-quality electric power, grid-tied energy storage systems are becoming a viable means for improving system reliability and realizing the benefits of Smart Grid. This paper investigates the optimal implementation of distributed storage resources in a power distribution system or islanded microgrid in conjunction with an intelligent load shedding scheme to minimize the societal costs of blackouts. First, a non-linear combinatorial optimization problem for prioritizing outage ride-through service is formulated and a solution methodology is proposed that combines a local search heuristic with simulated annealing. Next, a resource allocation optimization problem is developed to determine the optimal mix and placement of energy storage resources in a power distribution network for intentional islanding of sectionalizable sub-networks. Simulations are performed on the IEEE 123 node test feeder model subject to realistic power system constraints.

Optimal mix and placement of energy storage systems in power distribution networks for reduced outage costs

Electricity infrastructure touches us all — the key challenge, pertinent to this panel session, is to enable secure and very high-confidence sensing, communication and control of a heterogeneous, widely dispersed, yet globally interconnected system, which is a serious technological problem in any case It is even more complex and difficult to control it for optimal efficiency and maximum benefit to the ultimate consumers while still allowing all its business components to compete fairly and freely The North American power network may be considered to be the largest and most complex machine in the world — its transmission lines connect all the electric generation and distribution on the continent In that respect, it exemplifies many of the complexities of electric power infrastructure and how technological innovation combined with efficient markets and enabling policies can address them This network represents an enormous investment, including over 15,000 generators in 10,000 power plants, and hundreds of thousands of miles of transmission lines and distribution networks With diminished transmission and generation capacities, and with dramatic increases in inter-regional bulk power transfers and diversity of transactions, the electric power grid is being used in ways for which it was not originally designed Grid congestion and atypical power flows have been increasing during the last twenty five years, while customer expectations of reliability and cyber-physical security are rising to meet the needs of a pervasively digital world

S. Massoud Amin

Papers

Toward a smart grid: power delivery for the 21st century

Smart grid: Overview, issues and opportunities. Advances and challenges in sensing, modeling, simulation, optimization and control

The North American power delivery system: Balancing market restructuring and environmental economics with infrastructure security

Optimal mix and placement of energy storage systems in power distribution networks for reduced outage costs

Electricity infrastructure security: Toward reliable, resilient and secure cyber-physical power and energy systems