Smart grid framing through coverage in the Canadian media: Technologies coupled with experiences

There is a growing interest in 'smart grid' technologies in both industry and academic circles. Few attempts have been made to develop a written specification consummated with standards agreed upon by members of both coteries, due to lack of government support. Utilities in the state of California are obligated, by state legislature, to create a more: efficient, reliable, and intelligent electric power system. This initiative along with Florida Power & Lighting's 'Smart Grid' pilot program has created a sense of exigency within the industry regarding smart grid technologies and standardizations. Their accomplishments are beginning to shape the policies and standards with marginal input from academic societies, ushering in a very lopsided, and business acclimatized set of standards. We will present and analyze, a SCE 'Smart Grid' use case, in which the utilities back office applications interact with the customer's meter, and provide technical recommendations for system security improvements.

Achieving a low carbon economy has been the focus of Hong Kong in recent years. Strategies are put forth to support sustainable energy, because Hong Kong has inadequate local and renewable energy reserves. Smart grid technologies have benefited many countries in the world, and countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom, China, and South Korea are exploring this new green energy strategy. Hong Kong’s power companies have considered smart grid technologies, conducting pilot projects to test their local feasibility. In this research, stakeholders’ perspectives of the current status of smart grids are overviewed in Hong Kong from the angle of policy aspect. Stakeholder theory is utilized as the framework for understanding and analyzing the perceptions of stakeholder groups. An integrated and modified stakeholder power-interest matrix was developed for analyzing level of power and interest of stakeholder groups on smart grid from policy dimension.
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\nThrough the course of this research project, qualitative interviews were conducted for 11 interviewees with subjectsfrom1six stakeholder groups, including: academics, advisory bodies, business, government, non-governmental organizations, and power companies. Follow-up quantitative questionnaires were distributed to the same target group for stakeholder analysis and to map the level of power and interest of stakeholder groups regarding smart grid policy development in Hong Kong. The data collected from interviews were compared with and contrasted against each stakeholder groups and other countries, with a view to identifying common motivations, barriers, and policy suggestions. The findings reveal that the six stakeholder groups hold medium to high power and interest in smart grid policy development in Hong Kong.
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\nCommon motivations identified by local stakeholder groups include: the right to choose their own energy mix for power generation, potential behavioural change via smart meter and tariff restructuring, possible energy savings and emissions reductions for the environment, and corporate social responsibility. The most significant motivation for smart grid development shared with other countries is the goal of achieving low carbon economy and energy efficiency.
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\nShared barriers perceived by the six stakeholder groups are: unreliable renewable power supplies, significant capital investments required, impracticalities of supplying electricity back to the grid, transfers of additional power generation costs to consumers, and limited smart grid knowledge by the public. The most significant barrier shared with international countries is funding mechanism, yet it may be difficult for Hong Kong to secure funding from the government because of problems of trust. 
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\nThree stages of recommendations are suggested. Short-term recommendations centre on the policy development direction of smart grid in Hong Kong, and include implementing dynamic pricing, undertaking a large-scale pilot program and establishing an awareness campaign (funded by the government)for educating the general public. Medium-term recommendation is to establish a joint green fund with the contributions of companies with large carbon footprints. Long-term recommendations include market liberalization and increases in market competition.

Against the backdrop of a global shift towards renewable energy sources (RES) and the increasing complexity of modern power grids, smart grids (SGs) emerge as a critical solution for enhancing efficiency, reliability, and sustainability. This paper reviews a total of 177 key references published between 2014 and 2024, providing a comprehensive analysis of the most recent advancements in SG technologies and their pivotal role in shaping the future of power systems. The research explores the multifaceted components of SGs, encompassing intelligent sensing, communication technologies, home energy management systems, demand-side management, smart metering, smart electric vehicle charging, smart lighting, the Internet of Things, and the integration of big data, while investigating their role in enhancing the power grid in a smart and digitally integrated manner. The paper also discusses the SG features that have developed and improved the transmission and distribution networks, as well as the ancillary services on a grid-scale introduced through digitization. In addition, the status of the investment in SG is highlighted. The electrification of the global economy, driven by the urgent need to integrate RES, prompted an 8% increase in electricity grid investment in 2022. Additionally, digital technology investments for the grid constituted 19% of the total grid investment in the same year. SGs stand at the forefront of this transformation, playing a central role in facilitating the integration of variable RES, implementing digital technologies, smart devices, and optimizing power systems for diverse sectors. Despite substantial progress, some challenges persist that need further attention to ensure the seamless integration of SG technologies. The findings underscore the pivotal role of SGs in enhancing energy efficiency, effectively managing distributed energy resources, and strengthening the resilience of power systems. In conclusion, the recent advancements in SGs mark a transformative era for the power sector. However, to fully unlock their potential, it is essential to address the key challenges that hinder their seamless integration. Accordingly, these challenges are outlined to guide future research in developing innovative solutions that further optimize and advance the capabilities of SGs.

Reducing the power supply-demand gap and increasing reliability of power supply are the challenges of current energy management. Implementation of smart grid, smart meters and smart metering can be a possible solution for power demand reduction, efficient power supply management, and optimization of management resource usages. Smart meters include sophisticated measurement and calculation hardware, software, calibration and communication capabilities. For interoperability within a smart grid infrastructure, smart meters are designed to perform functions, and store and communicate data according to certain standards. In this work we discuss smart meter and various elements of smart metering, current state of the technologies related to smart grid, smart meter, advanced metering infrastructure (AMI), and meter data flow in smart grid. We also discuss standards related to smart meter, meter data format and data transmission, functions of smart meter, and functionalities of smart meters, currently deployed by utilities around the world.

An efficient dependable smart power grid relies on the secure real-time data collection and transmission service provided by a monitoring system. In such a system, the measuring units, such as phasor measurement units (PMUs) and smart meters (SMs), are critical. These measuring equipments function as sensors in the smart grid. Data exchanges between these sensors and the central controller are protected by various security protocols. These protocols usually contain computationally intensive cryptographic algorithms that cause heavy energy overhead to the sensor nodes. Since PMUs and SMs are mostly energy-constrained, the problem of how to ensure the secure communication with minimum energy cost becomes a critical issue for the functionality of the whole smart grid. In this article, we focus on the low power secure communication of the PMUs and SMs. We take two wireless sensor platforms as examples to experimentally investigate the approaches and principles of reconciling the two conflicting system requirements-communication security and low energy consumptions. The proposed methods are general ones and applicable to other energy-constrained yet security sensitive systems.

Approaching to the Smartest technological use the whole world is being aware of using the smartest technology of generating and distributing power throughout the country in a simple but effective system. Smart Grid technology is providing with this unique feature. A lot of features make it possible to differentiate the Smart Grid from the existing traditional grid in various manners. This paper basically focused on the Smart Grid (SG) technology. A technology that has let us dreamt about solution of maximum power problems including generation to distribution ends. In this time of technological advancement where all the governments are facing challenges of meeting the power demand of the consumers, smart grid can bring harmony in demand supply ratio. In this paper a brief detail about Smart Grid Technology, its application has been discussed.

PurposeSmart grid can be considered as the next step in the evolution of power systems. It comprises of different entities and objects ranging from smart appliances, smart meters, generators, smart storages, and more. One key problem in modeling smart grid is that while currently there has previously been a considerable focus on the proof of concept aspect of smart grid, there have been very few modeling attempts and even lesser attempts at formalization. To the best of our knowledge, formal specification has not been applied previously in the domain of smart grid.MethodsUsing a state-based formal specification language namely Z (pronounced as ‘Zed’), we present a novel approach to formally modeling and specify smart grid components.ResultsThe modeling exercise clearly demonstrates that Z is particularly suited for modeling various smart grid components.ConclusionsThe presented formal specification can be considered as a first step towards the modeling of smart grid using a Software Engineering formalism. It also demonstrates how formal specification can be used to model complex systems in general, and the smart grid, in particular.

In 21st Century traditional electric grid is unable to meet new challenges of world regarding reliable, efficient & clean energy. Therefore new advanced version or modernization of traditional electrical grid is necessary to overcome such problems. And the smart grid is the solution. Smart grid is nothing but future vision of traditional electrical grid. Smart grid technology gives roadmap for efficient, reliable & clean future electric power delivery system. This paper addresses role of smart grid in the effective integration of renewable energy to meet growing energy demand management. Now it's possible to manage energy demand of booming population by using smart home technology. Smart home technology emerging from smart grid sector contributes effective energy management by using concept of home area network (HAN). In the home area network (HAN) smart home appliances & smart meters communicate intelligently to manage Peak electric demand.

The emerging clean-energy smart grid environment in the electric power sector has necessitated that related educational programs evolve to meet the needs of students, faculty, and employers alike. In order to prepare the next generation of power engineering professionals to meet the challenges ahead in the electric power sector, a new curriculum must be developed that includes core power engineering principals coupled with emerging aspects of smart grid technologies and clean energy integration. Such curriculum also needs to consider not only the end-use side of the power system within the smart grid definition, such as smart metering, communications and demand response aspects, but also other key enabling technologies throughout the whole transmission and distribution system and the entire energy supply chain. These include areas such as energy storage technologies, advanced power electronics at the transmission and distribution levels, networked control systems, automation, renewable and alternative energy systems integration, system optimization, real-time control, and other related topics. In addition, the evolution of power programs and curriculum in this emerging area must take into account significant input from industry constituents engaged in the manufacturing, implementation, operation, and maintenance of the new smart grid technologies and systems. By working collaboratively with industry to meet future employer needs, programs with newly developed course offerings will be able to better prepare students and existing professionals alike for the rapidly growing clean-energy, smart grid environment. This paper will provide an overview of a potential model for program structures and course developments in this critical area, including examples of initiatives already being developed and deployed.

The performance and stability of the electric network are improved through smart grid technologies. The smart grid strongly rely on digital communication technologies creates security issues that must be addressed to distribute power efficiently and safely. For billing, load balancing, and energy management, the customer‐side smart meter regularly transmits the consumption reading to the system operator. However, dishonest customers created cyberattacks by entering fictitious readings of their electrical consumption in order to steal electricity for financial benefit. The distributed monitoring meter‐based network concept is utilized in this paper to closely monitor the losses. A two‐stage clustering‐based technique has also been suggested for the purpose of detecting theft. The approach can be detect the customer ID having abnormality in consumption pattern. To verify the effectiveness of the suggested strategy, numerical experiments on two datasets of smart meters have been conducted and four different types of attack patterns have been constructed. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme is very effective for detecting various types of attack patterns. In addition, the paper helps to predict how much power and financial loss the company will suffer as a result of multiple attacks.

Smart grid (SG) is an efficient electrical grid that provides opportunities to manage the energy load in a reliable and efficient way. Moreover, smart meters (SMs) are introduced, which play a vital role in communication between homes and SG. SMs manage and monitor the energy consumption of homes. SGs and SMs produce a big data, which is very hard to store and process even with cloud computing. For this purpose fog computing concept is introduced, which provides a good environment for computing and storing the data of SGs and SMs before transmitting them to cloud. The concept of fog computing, acts as a bridge between cloud and SGs. In this paper, a cloud-fog based architecture is integrated with SG for efficient energy management of buildings with SMs. To manage the energy requirements of consumers, micro grids (MGs) are available near to the buildings. Fogs are distributed over the world, overhaul the cloud via important features, including low latency and increased security for MGs. To balance the load on cloud and fogs, three load balancing algorithms are used. These algorithms are round robin (RR), throttled and greedy. Closest datacenter policy is used to compare their results. Greedy gives better results than RR and throttled.

Big data applications such as in smart electric grids, transportation, and remote environment monitoring involve geographically dispersed sensors that periodically send back information to central nodes. In many cases, data from sensors is not available at central nodes at a frequency that is required for real-time modeling and decision-making. This may be due to physical limitations of the transmission networks, or due to consumers limiting frequent transmission of data from sensors located at their premises for security and privacy concerns. Such scenarios lead to partial data problem and raise the issue of data veracity in big data applications. We describe a novel solution to the problem of making short term predictions (up to a few hours ahead) in absence of real-time data from sensors in Smart Grid. A key implication of our work is that by using real-time data from only a small subset of influential sensors, we are able to make predictions for all sensors. We thus reduce the communication complexity involved in transmitting sensory data in Smart Grids. We use real-world electricity consumption data from smart meters to empirically demonstrate the usefulness of our method. Our dataset consists of data collected at 15-min intervals from 170 smart meters in the USC Microgrid for 7 years, totaling 41,697,600 data points.

The smart meters in electricity grids enable fine-grained consumption monitoring. Thus, suppliers could adjust their tariffs. However, as smart meters are deployed within the smart grid field, authentication and key establishment between smart grid parties (smart meters, aggregators, and servers) become an urgency. Besides, as privacy is becoming a big concern for smart meters, smart grid parties are reluctant to leak their real identities during the authentication phase. In this paper, we analyze the recent authentication schemes in smart grids and other applied fields, and propose an anonymous authentication and key establishment scheme between smart grid parties: FAuth. The proposed scheme is based on bilinear maps and the computational Diffie–Hellman problem. We changed the way the smart meter parties registered at Key Generation Center, making the proposed scheme robust against various potential attacks that could be launched by the Key Generation Center, as the scheme could avoid the private key of the smart meter parties from leaking to the Key Generation Center. Besides, the proposed scheme reduced the computational load, both at the smart meter side and at the aggregator side, which make it perfectly suitable for computation-constrained devices. Security proof results show the proposed scheme is secure under the BAN logic and random oracle model.

Traditional electric generation based on fossil fuel consumption threatens the humanity with global warming, climate change, and increased carbon emission. Renewable resources such as wind or solar power are the solution to these problems. The smart grid is the only choice to integrate green power resources into the energy distribution system, control power usage, and balance energy load. Smart grids employ smart meters which are responsible for two-way flows of electricity information to monitor and manage the electricity consumption. In a large smart grid, smart meters produce tremendous amount of data that are hard to process, analyze and store even with cloud computing. Fog computing is an environment that offers a place for collecting, computing and storing smart meter data before transmitting them to the cloud. This environment acts as a bridge in the middle of the smart grid and the cloud. It is geographically distributed and overhauls cloud computing via additional capabilities including reduced latency, increased privacy and locality for smart grids. This study overviews fog computing in smart grids by analyzing its capabilities and issues. It presents the state-of-the-art in area, defines a fog computing based smart grid and, gives a use case scenario for the proposed model.

Smart grid technologies are expected to increase system efficiency and reliability using advancement in automation, communication, computation, and optimization. Several control algorithms have been developed or enhanced for operation and control of smart distribution grid. In recent years, volt/var control (VVC) algorithms have been proposed for energy saving in distribution systems due to advancement provided by smart grid automation and control. VVC helps to lower distribution feeder voltage to decrease energy consumption. However, quantification of this impact is hard due to several external factors such as weather and end users' behavior. On the other hand, existing evaluation methods of VVC algorithms are either not suitable for long-term study or intrusive. This paper addresses these issues by proposing a new technique to estimate “distribution system demand without smart grid implementation” utilizing “data measured from system with smart grid implementation.” Interdependence of voltage and load is considered based on estimated load characteristic. Our key contribution is developing a method for quantifying the real-time energy saving of smart grid automation and control focused on VVC and implementing in an electric utility in eastern Washington, USA. The algorithm is developed using both commercial and open-source software.