The Current State of Smart Grid Development.

The current state of smart grid development
Executive Summary:
The commercial techniques involved in the production, distribution and transmission of power
had been replaced with the integrated smart grids, which is found to be a unique solution
integrating all the power resources thereby promoting the consumers with the better solution.
Every household could be capable of providing their electricity and storing them so that they
could use it for their own self and also store them in the grid [1]. Smart grid technology can
facilitate bi-directional flow rate of electrons thereby decreasing the cost of consumption of
electricity that functions in a real-time. The electricity could also be sold to the grid during the
surplus generation that ensures power availability with high quality. The consumption pattern
could also be changed by shifting the consumption pattern during peak hours (expensive to
cheaper). This makes the current flow very efficient, interactive, customer-friendly and adaptive
to the environment.
Background:
According to the statistics taken in March 2017, India’s population is found to be around
1,326,801,576, while occupying the surface area of about 3.287 million km². Also, the National
Grid of the utility electricity sector in India has the installed capacity of 326.8 GW that is shown
in Figure 1. The energy consumption in India is found to be 1114.41 TWh and the power
installed capacity have been 326.8 GW in the year 2017. The gross electricity produced by
utilities in India accounted for around 1159.835 Billion Units in the year 2016 till 2017,
however, per capita electricity consumption accounted for 1,075 kWh in the year 2015 till 2016
[2]. India has incorporated several methods to effectively use energy and encouraged green
energy such a way the country has increased its energy with a share of oil, coal, gas, nuclear
power and hydropower. This initiative was created due to tremendous transmission &
distribution losses that occurred in the year 2014-15 (provisional) with commercial losses of
around 22.77%. The main objective of the initiative was on distribution utilities and it aimed to
decrease the Aggregate Technical and Commercial (AT&C) losses below 12% by 2022, and
below 10% by 2027, transmission utilities to lessen transmission losses to below 3.5% by 2022
in the country. This initiative was successful in 2017 that experience a decrease in transmission
loss to below 4% as well as Aggregate Technical and Commercial (AT&C) loss to below 15%.
Due to the success of this initiative, the country has created a target for sustainable and green
energy by the year 2023.

Figure 1: Power Scenario of India with the utility of resources [4]
Indian electricity sector supports many untapped potentials and also many business opportunities
had been created with the benefits of smart grids and micro-grid structure affirmed by the
representatives of the energy industries and also the government officials. The main goal of the
electrification in India is to promote 24x7 availability of electric power for all the people of the
country and also encouraging the most benefits for the agriculture sectors by the year 2021 [3].
Depending on the renewable energy sources is spasmodic in nature as the energy could be
received only when nature impacts the situation (solar energy, wind energy etc.), where these
conditions are found to be uncontrollable. The overall support for the development of a smart
grid in India is found to be very immense as the system could support both the transmission as
well as the distribution of electrical supply.
Key Issues:
The smart grid is composed of four main important components:
1) Advanced Metering Infrastructure:
The main work of the AMI is to maintain contact with the load by supporting the power grid
operation with the users. It supports
 Smart meters- plays a role of exchanging the information from the network to the load
side and also manages the hourly pricing, switching function, power quality detection,
etc.
 Communication facilities- This supports bidirectional communication among the utility
and the user.

 Meter data management system- It interacts with the information system by analysing the
database and also functions in determining the legitimate authentication and evaluation
for AMI data.
 Home networking- The interaction with the user portal makes the equipment to obtain
with less power consumption.
Figure 2: Overview of AMI [5]
2) Advanced Distribution Operation:
ADO enables self-healing capability by automatically controlling all the power devices.
3) Advanced Transmission Operation:
ATO reduces the risk on a very large scale by performing intelligent transmission. The
components involved here is the advanced grid monitoring technology and transmission network
compatibility technology.
4) Advanced Asset Management: