Load Profiling Tool to Support Smart Grid Operation Scenarios

This paper presents the characterization of high voltage (HV) electric power consumers based on a data clustering approach. The typical load profiles (TLP) are obtained selecting the best partition of a power consumption database among a pool of data partitions produced by several clustering algorithms. The choice of the best partition is supported using several cluster validity indices. The proposed data-mining (DM) based methodology, that includes all steps presented in the process of knowledge discovery in databases (KDD), presents an automatic data treatment application in order to preprocess the initial database in an automatic way, allowing time saving and better accuracy during this phase. These methods are intended to be used in a smart grid environment to extract useful knowledge about customers’ consumption behavior. To validate our approach, a case study with a real database of 185 HV consumers was used.

Analysis of Consumption Data to Detect Commercial Losses Using Performance Evaluation Methods in a Smart Grid

Electric power networks, namely distribution networks, have been suffering several changes during the last years due to changes in the power systems operation, towards the implementation of smart grids. Several approaches to the operation of the resources have been introduced, as the case of demand response, making use of the new capabilities of the smart grids. In the initial levels of the smart grids implementation reduced amounts of data are generated, namely consumption data. The methodology proposed in the present paper makes use of demand response consumers’ performance evaluation methods to determine the expected consumption for a given consumer. Then, potential commercial losses are identified using monthly historic consumption data. Real consumption data is used in the case study to demonstrate the application of the proposed method.

A Communication and Resources Management Scheme to Support the Smart Grid Integration of Multiplayers Access to Resources Information

The increasing and intensive integration of distributed energy resources into distribution systems requires adequate methodologies to ensure a secure operation according to the smart grid paradigm. In this context, SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) systems are an essential infrastructure. This paper presents a conceptual design of a communication and resources management scheme based on an intelligent SCADA with a decentralized, flexible, and intelligent approach, adaptive to the context (context awareness). The methodology is used to support the energy resource management considering all the involved costs, power flows, and electricity prices leading to the network reconfiguration. The methodology also addresses the definition of the information access permissions of each player to each resource. The paper includes a 33-bus network used in a case study that considers an intensive use of distributed energy resources in five distinct implemented operation contexts.

Convergence of Smart Grid ICT architectures for the last mile

The evolution of the electrical grid into a smart grid, allowing user production, storage and exchange of energy, remote control of appliances, and in general optimizations over how the energy is managed and consumed, is also an evolution into a complex Information and Communication Technology (ICT) system. With the goal of promoting an integrated and interoperable smart grid, a number of organizations all over the world started uncoordinated standardization activities, which caused the emergence of a large number of incompatible architectures and standards. There are now new standardization activities which have the goal of organizing existing standards and produce best practices to choose the right approach(es) to be employed in specific smart grid designs. This paper follows the lead of NIST and ETSI/CEN/CENELEC approaches in trying to provide taxonomy of existing solutions; our contribution reviews and relates current ICT state-of-the-art, with the objective of forecasting future trends based on the orientation of current efforts and on relationships between them. The resulting taxonomy provides guidelines for further studies of the architectures, and highlights how the standards in the last mile of the smart grid are converging to common solutions to improve ICT infrastructure interoperability.

Financial implications for companies running standby generators in support of a smart grid

Integrating renewable energy into built environments requires additional attention to the balancing of supply and demand due to their intermittent nature. Demand Side Response (DSR) has the potential to make money for organisations as well as support the System Operator as the generation mix changes. There is an opportunity to increase the use of existing technologies in order to manage demand. Company-owned standby generators are a rarely used resource; their maintenance schedule often accounts for a majority of their running hours. DSR encompasses a range of technologies and organisations; Sustainability First (2012) suggest that the System Operator (SO), energy supply companies, Distribution Network Operators (DNOs), Aggregators and Customers all stand to benefit from DSR. It is therefore important to consider impact of DSR measures to each of these stakeholders. This paper assesses the financial implications of organisations using existing standby generation equipment for DSR in order to avoid peak electricity charges. It concludes that under the current GB electricity pricing structure, there are several regions where running diesel generators at peak times is financially beneficial to organisations. Issues such as fuel costs, Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC) charges, maintenance costs and electricity prices are discussed.

Smart grid

All over the world, electrical power systems are encountering radical change stimulated by the urgent need to decarbonize electricity supply, to swap aging resources and to make effective application of swiftly evolving information and communication technologies (ICTs). All of these goals converge toward one direction; ‘Smart Grid.’ The Smart Grid can be described as the transparent, seamless, and instantaneous two-way delivery of energy information, enabling the electricity industry to better manage energy delivery and transmission and empowering consumers to have more control over energy decisions. Basically, the vision of Smart Grid is to provide much better visibility to lower-voltage networks as well as to permit the involvement of consumers in the function of the power system, mostly through smart meters and Smart Homes. A Smart Grid incorporates the features of advanced ICTs to convey real-time information and facilitate the almost instantaneous stability of supply and demand on the electrical grid. The operational data collected by Smart Grid and its sub-systems will allow system operators to quickly recognize the best line of attack to protect against attacks, susceptibility, and so on, sourced by a variety of incidents. However, Smart Grid initially depends upon knowing and researching key performance components and developing the proper education program to equip current and future workforce with the knowledge and skills for exploitation of this greatly advanced system. The aim of this chapter is to provide a basic discussion of the Smart Grid concept, evolution and components of Smart Grid, environmental impacts of Smart Grid and then in some detail, to describe the technologies that are required for its realization. Even though the Smart Grid concept is not yet fully defined, the chapter will be helpful in describing the key enabling technologies and thus allowing the reader to play a part in the debate over the future of the Smart Grid. The chapter concludes with the experimental description and results of developing a hybrid prediction method for solar power which is applicable to successfully implement the ‘Smart Grid.’

Empowering the smart grid : can redox batteries be matched to renewable energy systems for energy storage?

The charging of an undivided cerium–zinc redox battery by various current waveforms some of which mimic the output of renewable energy (solar, wind, tidal, biofuel burning) to electricity transducers is considered in this work, where the battery operates through diffusion-only conditions, and is discharged galvanostatically. Under reasonable assumption, the mathematical model developed enables the observation that the performance characteristic of the cells charged with a constant power input differentiates between the various current–charge waveforms, with cell geometry and electrode kinetics playing subtle, but significant, roles; in particular, high efficiency is observed for sunlight-charged batteries which are thin and suffer no corrosion of the sacrificial electrode, and which have already experienced a charge–discharge cycle. The performance characteristics of the systems are interpreted in the light of consequences for smart grid realisation, and indicate that, for a constant power input, the most matched renewable is biofuel burning with a current output that linearly increases with time.

A novel distributed algorithm for power loss minimizing in Smart Grid

Because power generation of renewable resources are unstable and demands of the customers are time-varying, the supply power and demands of the customers are always unequal. To meet the demands of the customers, power is transmitted from primary power generation to secondary power generation. It will cause high power loss. To solve this problem, a distributed algorithm is proposed in this paper. By using the algorithm, the micro-grids are able to exchange power with their neighbors so as to minimize the total power losses of the smart grid. Moreover, communication overhead (bandwidth) is reduced, comparing with centralized algorithm. Through computer simulations, we demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can lead to near-optimal result for alleviating the average power loss per micro-grid and reduce the communication overhead significantly in contrast with the centralized approach.

Agent-based smart grid protection and security

The vision of a smart grid is to provide a modern, resilient, and secure electric power grid as it boasts up with a highly reliable and efficient environment through effective use of its information and communication technology (ICT). Generally, the control and operation of a smart grid which integrate the distributed energy resources (DERs) such as, wind power, solar power, energy storage, etc., largely depends on a complex network of computers, softwares, and communication infrastructure superimposed on its physical grid architecture facilitated with the deployment of intelligent decision support system applications. In recent years, multi-agent system (MAS) has been well investigated for wide area power system applications and specially gained a significant attention in smart grid protection and security due to its distributed characteristics. In this chapter, a MAS framework for smart grid protection relay coordination is proposed, which consists of a number of intelligent autonomous agents each of which are embedded with the protection relays. Each agent has its own thread of control that provides it with a capability to operate the circuit breakers (CBs) using the critical clearing time (CCT) information as well as communicate with each other through high speed communication network. Besides physical failure, since smart grid highly depends on communication infrastructure, it is vulnerable to several cyber threats on its information and communication channel. An attacker who has knowledge about a certain smart grid communication framework can easily compromise its appliances and components by corrupting the information which may destabilize a system results a widespread blackout. To mitigate such risk of cyber attacks, a few innovative counter measuring techniques are discussed in this chapter.