The function of “The Smart Grid” and the benefits of its distribution.

- What is smart grid?

- What does a Smart Grid do?
- How does smart grid technology benefit our daily life as an energy user?
- How communication network works in smart grid?
- How to maintain cybersecurity for Smart Grid Systems?
- What is the future of the smart grid technology?
-Environmental impact.

What is smart grid?

The Smart Grid. ... "The grid," refers to the electric grid, a network of transmission lines,
substations, transformers and more that deliver electricity from the power plant to your
home or business. It's what you plug into when you flip on your light switch or power up
your computer.
What does a Smart Grid do?
The Smart Grid represents an unprecedented opportunity to move the energy industry
into a new era of reliability, availability, and efficiency that will contribute to our
economic and environmental health. During the transition period, it will be critical to
carry out testing, technology improvements, consumer education, development of
standards and regulations, and information sharing between projects to ensure that the
benefits we envision from the Smart Grid become a reality. The benefits associated with
the Smart Grid include:
 More efficient transmission of electricity
 Quicker restoration of electricity after power disturbances
 Reduced operations and management costs for utilities, and ultimately lower
power costs for consumers
 Reduced peak demand, which will also help lower electricity rates
 Increased integration of large-scale renewable energy systems
 Better integration of customer-owner power generation systems, including
renewable energy systems
 Improved security. [1]

How does smart grid technology benefit our daily life as an energy user?
With smart grid technology you are able to save money, take control of your daily
electric energy consumption more effectively and help protect the environment. Read
on, and you’ll agree that there are many reasons why the smart grid is the beneficial to
you in the following ways:

Saving money: Through advance metering, utilities are able to provide demand
response programs, which are designed to assist energy users in cutting back on power
usage during heat waves and cold spells by reducing peak-demand periods on the grid,
saving you money.
Managing energy consumption: Digital metering is allowing individuals to moderate
their household energy usage and reduce demand. It gives access to their electric
consumption data, especially during high-energy usage peaks, which help energy users
make better informed energy choices.
Energy reliability: Digital meters are enabling utilities to provide more reliable energy
service which decreases the amount of electric outages. Smart meters can
electronically report the location of an outage before a person will ever have to call their
utility, making restoration faster and status notification to individuals much easier.
Protecting the environment: The smart grid can cut air pollution from the electric utility
sector as much as 30 percent by 2030, saving 34,000 deaths a year. Also, the smart
grid ensures that renewable power sources like wind farms, solar plants and hydro
stations can be integrated. Yearly energy savings from the smart grid could equal 70
million road trips around the world or driving an electric car 1.7 trillion miles. [2]

How Communication Network works in smart grid?

While there is a clear need for communication networks supporting reliable information
transfer between the various entities in the electric grid, there are many issues related
to network performance, suitability, interoperability, and security that need to be
resolved. This project will focus on identifying opportunities to tailor communication
protocols that have been designed for network traffic control to provide quality of service
(QoS) to smart grid applications and to manage power flows in the smart grid between
traditional and renewable generation sources and between utility-owned and customer-
owned assets. By creating collaborative links between the stakeholders, users, and
standard developing organizations (SDOs) working on telecommunications, this project
will promote the use and deployment of interoperable communication protocols for
smart grid. In addition, the analytical and simulation tools and the published research
findings that will be produced by this project will foster the development of new areas of
inquiry into smart grid specific communication technologies. [3]
What is advanced metering system in Smart Distribution Grid?
Electricity meters today face unprecedented challenges, from distorted waveforms on
the grid, bidirectional metering for renewables, and the use of meters as distribution grid
sensors for monitoring and control. This project is focused on the measurement
accuracy performance and role of smart meters as distributed end-node sensors in the
distribution grid, providing leadership for an ANSI standard for meter upgradeability, and
creating a testbed for testing the best commercially-available smart meters, expected to
have 0.05% measurement accuracy. Additionally testing will be extended to cover smart
meters with auxiliary devices enabled, particularly communications, and additional
contributions will be made to a new ANSI standard. A key linkage with the Smart Grid
Systems Performance thrust is that accurate characterization of the electromagnetic
environments in which these meters must operate is an important input to this project.
[4]

How to maintain cybersecurity for Smart Grid Systems?

Smart grid cybersecurity must address both inadvertent compromises of the electric
infrastructure, due to user errors, equipment failures, and natural disasters, and
deliberate attacks, such as from disgruntled employees, industrial espionage, and
terrorists. NIST will address these challenges through research conducted in the NIST
Smart Grid Testbed facility and leadership within the Smart Grid Interoperability Panel
(SGIP) Cybersecurity Committee (SGCC) to evaluate of cybersecurity policies and
measures in industry standards, and development of relevant guidance documents for
the smart grid cybersecurity community. The primary goal is to develop a cybersecurity
risk management strategy for the smart grid to enable secure interoperability of
solutions across different domains and components. The Cybersecurity for Smart Grid
Systems Project is moving forward to address the critical cybersecurity needs by
promoting technology transfer of best practices, standards and voluntary guidance, and
research in the areas of applied cryptography and cybersecurity for microgrids. This
project will provide foundational cybersecurity guidance, cybersecurity reviews and
recommendations for standards and requirements, outreach, and foster collaborations
in the cross-cutting issue of cybersecurity in the smart grid. [5]

What is the future of the smart grid technology?

The traditional grid was based on keeping up supply to meet demand (with reserve
margins). Renewables make this harder. In the future, instead of supply matching
demand, a Smart Grid can enable demand to also match (varying) supply, at least in
part. How this is achieved is a work in progress.
India already had significant load management through the use of phase-wise rostering
of supply for irrigation pumpsets in rural areas – 3 phase supply is meant to begiven
only during off-peak periods, including the night. Unfortunately, such load-flattening
cannot continue, in part because at some point, pump set use will approach
saturation (not to mention they must become more efficient), while overall demand will
grow. Today’s relatively flat demand profiles will have greater and greater peak/off-peak
gaps, pushing not only Time of Day pricing but even Smart Grids.
As a thought experiment, if we take all the homes that don’t have electricity (either at a
wire level or at meaningful supply levels), and we give them minimum lifeline supply of,
say, 100 watts, the total extra capacity we’d need even from the centralized grid, with
technical losses, would only be on the order of 15 GW of capacity. This is less than
India has added in a single year. The catch is we have no means today of either limiting
usage to 100 watts or of ensuring supply goes to such users (electricity flows like water
based on voltage differentials, so new capacity is shared across the grid based on
physics). Smart Grid technologies now exist to en-able such curtailment through smart
meters. The alternative of using distributed renewables holds promise mainly for remote
locations far from the grid, or where the load is limited, such as for lighting. The flip side,
which might yet materialize, is that as new “lifeline” users grow their demand, RE supply
costs will fall even further, changing the dynamics of the grid. This might drive
microgrids in many regions.
Renewables create grid management challenges, but new technologies can help
manage such issues better. A not-so-well known fact is that the grid is mostly
constrained not by the physics of the wires overloading (thermal limits) but by stability
limits. Smart grid monitoring technologies such as Wide Area Measurement Systems
(WAMS) on transmission lines, which can help measure the stability of the grid in real
time, can reduce the risks of grid collapses, and even allow the grid to be used more
efficiently (higher loading). Smart grids have been described as a work in progress, a
journey, with different utilities worldwide at different levels of implementation.
A lower hanging fruit might be something as simple as Dynamic Line Rating (DLR),
which has particular relevance for wind power generation and should be started across
high-wind regions of India at the least. Most transmission lines have a rating based on
their conductor, and this is often a conservative rating. DLR, with measurements, makes
the loading limit not only dynamic, it factors in things like wind-speed. The higher the
wind, the more current the line can carry safely without overheating, which is precisely
when wind turbines would pump out more power.
A combination of short-term, medium-term, and long term focused efforts will be the
path ahead for Smart Grid projects in India. Smart grids have been described as a work
in progress, a journey, with different utilities worldwide at different levels of
implementation. If these are tough to get right in developed regions, do Smart Grids
make sense for India, which is still struggling to keep the lights on (and provide
access)? Smart Grids can and should look different in different places, and an Indian
Smart Grid becomes not only an option but, likely, an inevitable transformation of the
grid. Because business-as-usual just will not meet the aspirations in terms of speed,
economics, equity and sustainability. [6]

Environmental Impact
The Smart Grid offers significant reductions in environmental impact through two
sources: conservation and greater renewable generation integration. Greenhouse gas2
emission reductions can be traced directly to Smart Grid capabilities – such as time-
varying rates and customer energy management systems – offering a conservation
effect. We find that the Smart Grid increases the level of customer sited generation that
the distribution grid can reliably and efficiently accommodate. To the extent this
generation is renewable, Smart Grid capabilities designed to accommodate it offer even
more significant environmental benefits.

Conclusion
The major source of energy for human beings is electricity. Without electricity, no
technology or science could have been possibly developed. But there are many
problems associated with effective functioning of the electric grids which cause a
serious loss of power and may even create severe scarcity in future. Also, the latest
advancements in generation of electricity from renewable sources also require a means
for effective utilization.
So, keeping in view of these, for better performance of the grid, smart grids should be
developed all over the world So that we have a more transparent, reliable system that
allows consumers to save money and utility companies to more accurately control
electricity.
Thus Smart Grid technology paves way for increased utilization of green power.
References

[1] SMARTGRID.GOV, "The Smart Grid," [Online]. Available:

https://www.smartgrid.gov/the_smart_grid/smart_grid.html. [Accessed 21 March 2019].

[2] SMART GRID WHERE THE POWER IS GOING, "4 WAYS THE SMART GRID BENEFITS YOU," [Online].
Available: http://www.whatissmartgrid.org/featured-article/4-ways-the-smart-grid-benefits-you.

[3] NIST, "Smart Grid Communication Networks," [Online]. Available: https://www.nist.gov/programs-

projects/smart-grid-communication-networks.

[4] NIST, "Advanced Metering in Smart Distribution Grids," [Online]. Available:

https://www.nist.gov/programs-projects/advanced-metering-smart-distribution-grids.

[5] NIST, "Cybersecurity for Smart Grid Systems," [Online]. Available: https://www.nist.gov/programs-
projects/cybersecurity-smart-grid-systems.

[6] R. Tongia, "Smart Grids, Storage,and Renewables – Pillars," [Online]. Available:

https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/renewable-energy_ch9.pdf.