Smart grid initiative for power distribution utility in India

Abstract

After enactment of Electricity Act 2003 in India, a comprehensive change is happening in Indian power sector, and power distribution utilities are going through a reformation process to cope up with the regulatory change for reduction in Aggregated Technical and Commercial Loss, improvement in Power Quality, Reliability of Power Supply, Improvement in Customer Satisfaction and rationalization of electricity tariff. Apart from restructuring and unbundling of the power sector there is a need for introduction of ‘smart grid’ technology to increase the operational as well technological efficiency of the power distribution network to meet the growing energy demand of India in line with the GDP growth of the country. Smart Grid is sophisticated, digitally enhanced power systems where the use of modern communications and control technologies allows much greater robustness, efficiency and flexibility than today's power systems. A smart grid impacts all the components of a power system especially the distribution level. One subset of smart grids is smart metering / advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) etc. In a smart grid, all the various nodes need to interconnect to share data as and where needed. Smart Grid envisages providing choices to each and every customer for deciding the timing and amount of power consumption based upon the price of the power at a particular moment of time, apart from providing choices to the consumer and motivating them to participate in the operations of the grid, causing energy efficiency and accommodating all generation and storage options, Smart Grid also envisages various properties for the Grid like self-healing and adaptive The suite of Smart Grid products and technologies help maximizing system uptime, while also helping the utility more quickly to restore power to homes and businesses in the event of an outage. Government of India has recently formed “Smart Grid Forum” and “Smart Grid Task Force” for enablement of smart grid technology into Indian Power Distribution Utilities as a part of their Smart Grid initiative to meet their growing energy demand in similar with the developed country like USA, Europe etc.