smart grid

smart grid, a secure, integrated, reconfigurable, electronically controlled system used to deliver electric power that operates in parallel with a traditional power grid. Although many of its components had been developed, and some implemented, during the early 21st century, as of 2016 no smart grid was yet fully complete. This article therefore describes the possibilities and promise of the smart grid as conceptualized at that time.

Simply defined, an electric power grid is a network of wires, transformers, substations, and machines that connects power plants with customers. In such a traditional power grid, electricity is distributed in one direction, from power plant to customers, through a network that has few means of monitoring its transit and delivery. By contrast to this “dumb grid,” a “smart” power grid would include an array of sensors, communications networks, control systems, and computers that would improve the efficiency, security, and reliability of the end-to-end system. In particular, a smart grid could react to and minimize the impact of unforeseen events, such as power outages, giving the grid an unprecedented “self-healing” capability. Utilities would be able to charge customers variable rates based on fluctuations in supply and demand, and consumers could programmatically adjust their use of electricity in order to minimize costs. Finally, a stronger and smarter grid could do a better job of integrating wind power and solar energy into the electricity supply, and it could support a system for charging plug-in electric vehicles.

A self-healing grid

Even the smartest array of sensors and controllers would not be able to keep violent winds from blowing down power lines. However, a truly smart grid could at least be self-correcting and self-optimizing in the event of damage to the distribution system. That limited self-healing capacity would have three primary objectives. The most fundamental would be continual monitoring and reaction. Sensors such as phasor measurement units (PMUs) would monitor electrical parameters such as voltage and current multiple times per second and feed the data to control room operators. The data would be time-stamped, geographically located, and delivered at subsecond intervals, enabling the grid to “tune” itself constantly to an optimal state.

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The second goal would be anticipation. The automated system would constantly look for small problems, such as an overheating transformer, that might trigger larger disturbances. Computers would assess the possible consequences, identify and evaluate a number of corrective actions, and present the most useful responses to human operators.

The third objective would be rapid isolation. If a serious failure occurred, power could be rerouted by a system of smart switches. Essentially, the entire network could be broken into isolated “islands,” each of which would reorganize its power plants and transmission flows as best it could. Islanding might cause voltage fluctuations or even small outages, but it would prevent the cascades of outages that cause major blackouts, such as the major blackout of 2003 that shut down service for 50 million customers in much of the northeastern United States and eastern Canada. As line crews repaired the failures, human controllers would prepare each island to be rejoined to the larger grid.

Empowered consumers

Electric power systems have traditionally been built and operated on the principle that sufficient generator capacity must exist to meet all possible variations in consumers’ demand. That principle has had a profound effect on the design and operation of power grids, resulting in so-called excess capacity to meet peaks in demand, which typically occur during summer. Also, in most power systems the price paid by most customers for their electricity is the same during expensive peak generating periods as it is during periods of lower demand. System operators, on the other hand, have very few tools at their disposal to reduce peak demand from customers, short of emergency load shedding (shutting off power to certain areas) and rolling blackouts—blunt tools that are used in only the most extreme conditions.

The smart grid raises the possibility of moving away from that system of “inflexible loads” and toward a system where the price for delivering electricity could vary by the hour and where loads could respond immediately to changing conditions. A smart grid would terminate at the customer’s location in a device known as a smart meter. Much like a traditional meter, that instrument would measure the customer’s consumption of electricity in kilowatt-hours, but it also would calculate the price that was being paid by the customer each hour. So-called smart appliances (perhaps linked to the smart meter by wireless signal) could be scheduled to operate automatically at hours of low demand on the grid, thus keeping the customer’s costs to a minimum. Such a system might result in a “flattened” load curve, making it possible to reduce the amount of expensive generating and distribution equipment that would have to be installed simply to supply power for peak periods.

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Distributed energy resources

Plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs) would benefit greatly from smart metering systems, especially PEVs that had the additional ability to send power back into the grid from their batteries while the vehicles were idle. In those cases the vehicles would essentially serve as storage devices for the grid. In order to minimize costs or even maximize profits, smart metering could then schedule when the vehicle owners bought and sold energy.

PEVs that stored energy and sold it back to the grid would be a form of distributed energy resource. Another example would be microgrids, which are small power systems of several megawatts or less that serve small communities or even institutions such as universities. Microgrids have the capability to operate either interconnected with or islanded from traditional distribution systems. A smart grid would include automated systems for allowing local grids to determine when they should remain interconnected with microgrids and when they should become islanded.

In a similar manner, smart grids would facilitate the integration of renewable energy resources such as wind and solar power. Those resources reduce society’s consumption of fossil fuels, but they are notoriously dependent on meteorological conditions and are therefore intermittent in their supply, which creates special problems for integration into traditional power grids.

Grid security

Interoperability is one of the great strengths of the smart grid, but interoperability also makes the power-delivery system vulnerable to attack, and the number of targets only increases as more components are added to the system. The first security challenge of any electric infrastructure is physical attack, or attack against infrastructure, and there the challenge is daunting. The North American power grid, for instance, is so large and complex that it would be impossible to protect the entire interdependent infrastructure from end to end.

Meanwhile, menaces from cyberspace—involving malicious code, intrusions, or denial-of-service attacks, among other threats—are rapidly increasing and evolving. Although as of 2016 only one major power disruption—which occurred in Ukraine in December 2015 and affected 225,000 people—was known to have been caused by a cyberattack, public disclosures of vulnerabilities in the power grid have made those systems more attractive as targets. Before extensive deployment and implementation of a smart grid could begin, significant challenges in security against both cyber- and physical attack would have to be overcome. Proper security would involve a multilayered defense strategy for preventing single points of failure from bringing down the entire system. In the context of the smart grid, each autonomous system would have to maintain information about its neighbours and react in a self-protecting manner when threats were near. If any part of the end-to-end system was compromised, the system would reconfigure to protect itself, localize the attack, and fend it off.