Towards Indian Smart Grids

Abstract

India is struggling to meet the electric power demands of a fast expanding economy. Restructuring of the power industry has only increased several challenges for the power system engineers. A major chunk of the power losses is a direct derivative of the poor management of distribution networks. Distribution automation (DA) has been aimed at reducing losses, and improving reliability and financial viability of state utilities. Firstly, this paper presents various benefits achieved by major Indian utilities in transitioning towards automation. Enroute to the proposed vision of introducing viable Smart Grids (SG) at various levels in the Indian power systems, it is recommended that an advanced automation mechanism needs to be adapted. This is then projected to be feasible through invariable dependance on several open standards, whose integration for interoperability, flexibility, scalability, modularity and vendor neutrality is deemed pivotal. Various examples of existing structures of automation inIndia are employed to underscore some of the views presented in this paper. Finally, a potential SG architecture for Indian power systems is proposed with a discussion on its implications.

Software Architectures for Smart Grid System—A Bibliographical Survey

“…The market layer [36] utilizes all the system control information and uses advanced economic and financial applications, such as reserve co-optimization, risk management, load and price forecasting, and architecture to reduce distribution losses [43] and is designed to coordinate between market dynamics and regional load despatch center.…”

“…The utilities can retrieve data collected by the agents and use this information to control the power supply and decide which power sources to use. MAS-based software architecture for micro grids has been experimented in previous studies [35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49][51][52][53]. Agent-based software architectures are a potential technique in smart grids, hence plenty of research articles exist in this domain.…”

A Bibliographical Survey on Software Architectures for Smart Grid System

“…The focus on smart grid infrastructure in developing countries like India is steadily progressing. An article focussing on smart grid in India [18], classifies the architecture into three layers to accommodate control, sensor, communication and application components. The smart grid features like grid balancing, real time monitoring and fault management are implemented in operation and control layer [19] [30].…”

SmartGrid initiatives and power market in India

“…To achieve the above objectives, electricity grid intelligence is inevitable, which requires advanced control and communications technologies integrated with the utility network, thus providing the requirements of "SmartGrid". Reference [6] details the some of the SmartGrid deployment strategies for the Indian scenario. To facilitate demand side management, distribution networks are to be fully-augmented/upgraded for IT enabling.…”