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

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A Survey on Smart Grid Communication Infrastructures: Motivations, Requirements and Challenges

In this paper, we present a distributed incremental data aggregation approach, in which data aggregation is performed at all smart meters involved in routing the data from the source meter to the collector unit. With a carefully constructed aggregation tree, the aggregation route covers the entire local neighborhood or any arbitrary set of designated nodes with minimum overhead. To protect user privacy, homomorphic encryption is used to secure the data en route. Therefore, all the meters participate in the aggregation, without seeing any intermediate or final result. In this way, our approach supports efficient data aggregation in smart grids, while fully protecting user privacy. This approach is especially suitable for smart grids with repetitive routine data aggregation tasks.

/pdf/secure-information-aggregation-for-smart-grids-using-3lghqk5kow.pdf

Secure Information Aggregation for Smart Grids Using Homomorphic Encryption

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) will play a key role in the extension of the smart grid towards residential premises, and enable various demand and energy management applications. Efficient demand-supply balance and reducing electricity expenses and carbon emissions will be the immediate benefits of these applications. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of an in-home energy management (iHEM) application. The performance of iHEM is compared with an optimization-based residential energy management (OREM) scheme whose objective is to minimize the energy expenses of the consumers. We show that iHEM decreases energy expenses, reduces the contribution of the consumers to the peak load, reduces the carbon emissions of the household, and its savings are close to OREM. On the other hand, iHEM application is more flexible as it allows communication between the controller and the consumer utilizing the wireless sensor home area network (WSHAN). We evaluate the performance of iHEM under the presence of local energy generation capability, prioritized appliances, and for real-time pricing. We show that iHEM reduces the expenses of the consumers for each case. Furthermore, we show that packet delivery ratio, delay, and jitter of the WSHAN improve as the packet size of the monitoring applications, that also utilize the WSHAN, decreases.

Wireless Sensor Networks for Cost-Efficient Residential Energy Management in the Smart Grid

Review of energy storage technologies for sustainable power networks

Utilizing battery storage systems (BSSs) can reduce the intermittent output of PV generation systems (PVGSs) and make them dispatchable. The aim of this paper is to design an optimal charging/discharging scheduling for BSSs such that the line loss of distribution systems interconnected with sizeable PVGSs can be minimized. A mathematical model for BSSs which can be used to simulate the charging procedures such as the commonly-used constant current to constant voltage (CC-CV) charging method, the discharging procedures and the state of charge (SOC) is proposed first. The minimum line loss problem considering the intermittent output of PVGSs and the scheduling of BSSs is then formulated based on the BSS mathematical model. The optimal charging/discharging scheduling of BSSs can then be obtained by a genetic algorithm (GA) based method. Test results demonstrate the validity of the proposed mathematical model and optimal charging/discharging scheduling for BSSs.

Optimal Charging/Discharging Scheduling of Battery Storage Systems for Distribution Systems Interconnected With Sizeable PV Generation Systems

Many governments deploy ubiquitous IT project, which aims to combine the latest wireless network and wide-band technologies etc to accomplish a ubiquitous wireless communication network The ubiquitous wireless communication network can be utilized for the Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) Therefore, this paper tries to use the new wireless communication technologies to design and implement a ZigBee-based smart power meter An outage recording system is also designed and embedded into the smart meter The microcontroller of Microchip dsPIC30F series is used to develop the proposed smart power meter A ZigBee system is then deigned and integrated into the proposed power meter, and used to transmit the detailed power consumption data and outage event data to rear-end processing system The proposed smart power meter cannot only be used for power consumption data collection but also for outage event data recording The proposed system has great potential to be used to build the area-based AMI Experimental results demonstrate the validity of the proposed system Besides, the application of ZigBee communication in power area may, expectedly, lead to make a definite contribution to ubiquitous IT project

Development of a smart power meter for AMI based on ZigBee communication

Fault indicating devices such as fault indicators (FIs) have been widely used in distribution systems to improve reliability and reduce outage duration. Recently, FIs with communication interfaces are integrated into distribution automation (DA) to further reduce fault-finding time by reporting FIs' statuses back to control center. When faults occur, a lot of alarms and fault information are received from Outage Management System (OMS), Trouble Call System (TCS) and Customer Information System (CIS) and are shown to system operators. As a result, the identification of faulted line sections in a wide-ranging distribution system from FIs' statuses is not an easy task, especially when multiple faults occur simultaneously and/or distributed generators (DGs) are connected. An automatic and fast faulted line-section location method for distribution systems based on FIs is proposed in this paper. The line sections between adjacent FIs can be treated as a possible fault location (PFL) and the fault current detected by the FI can be considered as line current (LC) flowing between the adjacent PFLs. A relationship matrix between PFLs and LCs is then derived and used to design the proposed automatic and fast faulted line-section location method. The faulted line sections can then be located effectively and efficiently by the proposed method. Test results for an actual distribution system demonstrate the validity of the proposed faulted line-section location method.

Automatic and Fast Faulted Line-Section Location Method for Distribution Systems Based on Fault Indicators

The installation of Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) is looked upon as a bridge to the construction of smart grids; especially, while most of the power meters are still mechanical ones without digitization. An AMI consists of smart power meter, communication technology, meter data management, and associated software and hardware. After AMI has been implemented, many advanced functions e.g. automatic and accurate reliability calculation systems can be achieved. Therefore, this paper tries to develop an automatic reliability system for AMI. A ZigBee-based smart power meter with outage recording function is designed first. The ZigBee-based power meters are used to transmit the detailed power consumption data and outage event data to rear-end processing system periodically. According to the detailed and accurate data stored in the rear-end database, an automatic and accurate reliability calculation system can be designed sequentially. The customer interruption costs can also be estimated by the proposed system. Experimental results show that the proposed system has great potential to be integrated into AMI to improve the accuracy of reliability calculation.

Development of an automatic reliability calculation system for advanced metering infrastructure

This paper studies the wireless ZigBee network deployment for distribution feeders, especially, for the intelligent fault indicators mounted on distribution feeders. Researches reveal that ZigBee is suitable for constructing the communication network within distribution automation and/or smart grids; however, the network deployment should be carefully evaluated to make sure that the communication quality, packet error rate for example, is acceptable. Therefore, communication quality evaluation software for ZigBee network deployment which makes use of Google map is designed in this paper. The proposed software can be used to select the candidate locations for intelligent fault indicators placement by inspecting the terrain and possible obstacles from Google map and then the actual field test can be conducted. Different test scenarios including urban feeders, suburban feeders and mountainous feeders with respect to different transmitting range and obstacles can be conducted in the proposed software. The ZigBee network deployment procedure for distribution feeder is also recommended. Experimental results demonstrate the validity of the proposed system.

Shang-Wen Luan

Papers

Optimal Charging/Discharging Scheduling of Battery Storage Systems for Distribution Systems Interconnected With Sizeable PV Generation Systems

Development of a smart power meter for AMI based on ZigBee communication

Automatic and Fast Faulted Line-Section Location Method for Distribution Systems Based on Fault Indicators

Development of an automatic reliability calculation system for advanced metering infrastructure

Wireless network deployment for intelligent fault indicators - A case study with ZigBee