Performance evaluation of German smart meter infrastructure for load management through grid operators

Abstract

The transition to a climate-neutral energy system involves the integration of many small components—on the generation as well as on the consumption side. Their controllability is a crucial part of running a reliable energy system, for example, to prevent or resolve grid congestions. The smart meter infrastructure enables a secure integration of these small system units in grid operator processes. The technical realization of German smart meter infrastructure is detailed in the guidelines of the German Federal Office for Information Security. It must undergo certification before being deployed. In order to assess whether the standardized German infrastructure meets the requirements for the use case, we conducted a performance analysis including the three factors “overall reliability”, “emerging data volume”, and “latency time”. The investigated use case is “Load Management through Grid Operators”. For data collection, we used log records from all participating devices along the process chain and recorded all network traffic. In total, we executed over 2000 commands within the test series and analyzed over 3.0 mio. data points. We concluded 98.2% successful power limitations for the overall reliability. The average emerging data volume is 14.97 kB when executing one command within one communication session. The latency time from the command until the reaction is on average 51 s, referring to the case of a curative power limitation and needing to establish a communication channel. Thus, the requirements for the considered use case are fulfilled, provided that the capacity of communication infrastructure is made available according to the number of controllable components.