03-01-2013, 10:25 AM
SMART GRID TECHNOLOGY IN INDIAN POWER SECTOR
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INTRODUCTION
The Smart Grid is an idea of a better electricity delivery infrastructure. Smart Grid implementations will certainly increase the quantity, quality, and use of information available from advanced sensing, computing, and communications hardware and software. As a result, they help utilities address two of the main issues in today’s world:
• Environmental concerns.
• Power delivery limitations and disturbances.
Effective use of Smart Grid technologies helps utilities in:
• Improved grid usage.
• Improves grid efficiency and security.
• Better match of demand with supply of energy and grid congestion.
• Enable distributed generation.
• Allow customers to manage their consumption level and to take benefit of pricing and supply options.
• Cater the environmental issues.
Smart Grid Background
What are Smart Grids?
The Smart Grid is a combination of hardware, management and reporting software, built atop an intelligent communications infrastructure.In the world of the Smart Grid, consumers and utility companies alike have tools to manage, monitor and respond to energy issues.The flow of electricity from utility to consumer becomes a two-way conversation, saving consumers money, energy, delivering more transparency in terms of end-user use, and reducing carbon emissions. Modernization of the electricity delivery system so that it monitors, protects and automatically optimizes the operation of its interconnected elements – from the central and distributed generator through the high-voltage network and distribution system, to industrial users and building automation systems, to energy storage installations and to end-use consumers and their thermostats, electric vehicles, appliances and other household devices.The Smart Grid in large, sits at the intersection of Energy, IT and Telecommunication Technologies.
Key Drivers of the Smart Grid
Today, the electricity supply industry is wrestling with an unprecedented array of challenges, ranging from a supply-demand gap to rising costs and global warming. These and other forces are driving the need to reinvent the business. That, in turn, is driving the need for a smart grid. There is an emerging consensus on the principal forces driving the transformation of the electricity network worldwide; these are discussed first in this section.
India has limited experience with smart grid deployments and advanced metering, especially for small consumers and farmers. The factors that will drive India’s adoption of smart grids include the need to reduce technical and commercial losses, resolve its the chronic supply-demand gap, and find a way to “leapfrog” into a more advanced electricity supply solution to satisfy its sustainable, low-carbon, high-growth economic development goals.
NEED OF SMART GRID
Environmental Impact
Smart Grid development is happening at a very fast pace because of the broad interest of policy makers and utilities in decreasing the adverse effect that energy usage has on the environment. Smart Grids uses technology to drive efficiencies in transmission, distribution, and consumption. As a result, fewer generating plants, fewer transmission and distribution assets are required in order to cater the growing demand of electricity. With the possible expectation of wind farm sprawl, landscape preservation is one of the evident benefits. Since maximum generation today results in emission of greenhouse gas, Smart Grids reduces air pollution and plays a significant role in combating global climate change issue.
Smart Grids has the capability to accommodate technical difficulties of integrating renewable resources like wind and solar to the grid, providing further reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.
Costs
The ability to bypass the cost of the plant and grid development is a major advantage to both the utilities and customers. And Smart Grids will not reduce funds expansion, of course; therefore huge investments are required in order to setup a link between the customers and the Smart Grid. Further with the aid of Smart Grids less generating units would be required in order to fulfil the energy demand of the growing population and cost of setting up more and more plants can be deferred. At that point of time, more emphasis will be on overall development of T&D efficiency based on demand response, load control, and many other Smart Grid technologies.
Energy efficiency would be the second priority in order to save cost with reference to the customers. With timely and detailed information provided by Smart Grids, customers would be encouraged to limit waste, adopt energy-efficient building standards, and invest more and more in energy efficient appliances.
Utility Operations
Smart Grids can assist the utilities, as the principal focus of the utilities is to improve business processes. Many utilities have anextensive list of projects that they would like to fund in order to improve the customer service or to ease workforce’s burden of repetitive work. Calculating Smart Grid benefits by the cost/benefit analysis it puts emphasis in favour of the change and can also significantly decrease settlement/payback periods.
Mobile workforce group and asset management group work collectively to organize assets and then maintain, renovate, and replace them. Thus results in increased productivity and fuel saving from superior methods.
BARRIERS IN IMPLEMENTATION OF SMART GRID
Policy and regulation
The current policy and regulatory frameworks were typically designed to deal with the existing networks and utilities. To some extent the existing model has encouraged competition in generation and supply of power but is unable to promote clean energy supplies. With the move towards smart grids, the prevailing policy and regulatory frameworks must evolve in order to encourage incentives for investment. The new frameworks will need to match the interests of the consumers with the utilities and suppliers to ensure that the societal goals are achieved at the lowest cost to the consumers.
Generally, governments set policy whereas regulators monitor the implementation in order to protect the consumers and seeks to avoid market exploitation. Over the last two decades, the trend of liberalized market structure in various parts of the world has focused the attention of policy-makers on empowering competition and consumer choice. The regulatory models have evolved to become more and more effective to avoid market abuse and to regulate the rates of return.
Moving forward, the regulatory model will have to adopt the policy which focuses much on long term carbon reduction and security of supply in the defined outcomes and they need to rebalance the regulatory incentives to encourage privately financed utilities to invest at rates of return that are commensurate to the risk. This may mean creating frameworks that allow risk to be shared between customers and shareholders, so that risks and rewards are balanced providing least aggregate cost to the customer.