Smart Solutions: Smart Grid Demokit

Treball desenvolupat dins el marc del programa 'European Project Semester'.The purpose of this report is to justify the design choices of the smart grid demo kit. Something had to be designed to make a smart grid clear for people who have little knowledge about smart grids. The product had to be appealing and clear for people to understand. And eventually should be usable, for example, on an information market. The first part of the research consisted of looking how to shape the whole system. How the 'tiles' had to look to be interactive for users and what they should feature. One part of this was doing research to get to know more about the already existing knowledge amount users. Another research investigated what appeals the most to the users. After this, a concept was created in compliance with the group and the client. The concept consists of hexagonal tiles, each with a different function: houses, solar panels, wind turbines, factories and energy storages. These tiles are all different parts of a smart grid. When combining these tiles, it can be made clear to users how smart grids work. The tiles are fabricated using a combination of 3D printing and laser cutting. The tiles have laser cut symbols on top of them to show what part of the smart grid they are. Digital LED strips are on top of the tiles to show the direction of the energy flow, and the colors indicate if the tile is producing or consuming power from the grid. The tiles are connected to each other by the so called “grid blocks”. These blocks make up the central power grid and are also lighting up by LED strips. Each tile is equipped with a microcontroller which controls the LED strips and makes it possible for the different tiles to “talk” with each other. Using this, the central tile knows which tiles are connected to the system. The central tile controls all tiles and runs the simulation of the smart grid. For further development of the project, it can be investigated how to control and adjust the system from an external system, for example by a tablet. The final product consists of five tiles connected by seven grid blocks which show how a smart grid works

Secure Communication Architecture for Dynamic Energy Management in Smart Grid

open access articleSmart grid takes advantage of communication technologies for efficient energy management and utilization. It entails sacrifice from consumers in terms of reducing load during peak hours by using a dynamic energy pricing model. To enable an active participation of consumers in load management, the concept of home energy gateway (HEG) has recently been proposed in the literature. However, the HEG concept is rather new, and the literature still lacks to address challenges related to data representation, seamless discovery, interoperability, security, and privacy. This paper presents the design of a communication framework that effectively copes with the interoperability and integration challenges between devices from different manufacturers. The proposed communication framework offers seamless auto-discovery and zero- con figuration-based networking between heterogeneous devices at consumer sites. It uses elliptic-curve-based security mechanism for protecting consumers' privacy and providing the best possible shield against different types of cyberattacks. Experiments in real networking environment validated that the proposed communication framework is lightweight, secure, portable with low-bandwidth requirement, and flexible to be adopted for dynamic energy management in smart grid

Software Defined Networks based Smart Grid Communication: A Comprehensive Survey

The current power grid is no longer a feasible solution due to ever-increasing user demand of electricity, old infrastructure, and reliability issues and thus require transformation to a better grid a.k.a., smart grid (SG). The key features that distinguish SG from the conventional electrical power grid are its capability to perform two-way communication, demand side management, and real time pricing. Despite all these advantages that SG will bring, there are certain issues which are specific to SG communication system. For instance, network management of current SG systems is complex, time consuming, and done manually. Moreover, SG communication (SGC) system is built on different vendor specific devices and protocols. Therefore, the current SG systems are not protocol independent, thus leading to interoperability issue. Software defined network (SDN) has been proposed to monitor and manage the communication networks globally. This article serves as a comprehensive survey on SDN-based SGC. In this article, we first discuss taxonomy of advantages of SDNbased SGC.We then discuss SDN-based SGC architectures, along with case studies. Our article provides an in-depth discussion on routing schemes for SDN-based SGC. We also provide detailed survey of security and privacy schemes applied to SDN-based SGC. We furthermore present challenges, open issues, and future research directions related to SDN-based SGC.Comment: Accepte

Internet of Things-aided Smart Grid: Technologies, Architectures, Applications, Prototypes, and Future Research Directions

Traditional power grids are being transformed into Smart Grids (SGs) to address the issues in existing power system due to uni-directional information flow, energy wastage, growing energy demand, reliability and security. SGs offer bi-directional energy flow between service providers and consumers, involving power generation, transmission, distribution and utilization systems. SGs employ various devices for the monitoring, analysis and control of the grid, deployed at power plants, distribution centers and in consumers' premises in a very large number. Hence, an SG requires connectivity, automation and the tracking of such devices. This is achieved with the help of Internet of Things (IoT). IoT helps SG systems to support various network functions throughout the generation, transmission, distribution and consumption of energy by incorporating IoT devices (such as sensors, actuators and smart meters), as well as by providing the connectivity, automation and tracking for such devices. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey on IoT-aided SG systems, which includes the existing architectures, applications and prototypes of IoT-aided SG systems. This survey also highlights the open issues, challenges and future research directions for IoT-aided SG systems

Modeling the controlled delivery power grid

Competitive energy markets, stricter regulation, and the integration of distributed renewable energy sources are forcing companies to reengineer energy production and distribution. The Controlled Delivery Power Grid is proposed as a novel approach to transport energy from generators to consumers. In this approach, energy distribution is performed in an asynchronous and distributed fashion. Much like the Internet, energy is delivered as addressable packets, which allow a controlled delivery of energy. As a proof-of-concept of the controllable delivery grid, two experimental test beds, one with integrated energy storage and another with no energy storage, were designed and built to evaluate the efficiency of a power distribution and scheduling scheme. Both test beds use a request-grant protocol where energy is supplied in discrete quantities. The performance of the system is measured in terms of the ability to satisfy requests from consumers. The results show high satisfaction ratios for distribution capacities that are smaller than the maximum demand. The distribution of energy is modelled with graph theory and as an Integer Linear Programming problem to minimize transmission losses and determine routes for energy flows in a network with distributed sources and consumers. The obtained results are compared with a heuristic approach based on the Dijkstra\u27s shortest path algorithm, which is proposed as a feasible approach to routing the transmission of packetized energy

What Can Wireless Cellular Technologies Do about the Upcoming Smart Metering Traffic?

The introduction of smart electricity meters with cellular radio interface puts an additional load on the wireless cellular networks. Currently, these meters are designed for low duty cycle billing and occasional system check, which generates a low-rate sporadic traffic. As the number of distributed energy resources increases, the household power will become more variable and thus unpredictable from the viewpoint of the Distribution System Operator (DSO). It is therefore expected, in the near future, to have an increased number of Wide Area Measurement System (WAMS) devices with Phasor Measurement Unit (PMU)-like capabilities in the distribution grid, thus allowing the utilities to monitor the low voltage grid quality while providing information required for tighter grid control. From a communication standpoint, the traffic profile will change drastically towards higher data volumes and higher rates per device. In this paper, we characterize the current traffic generated by smart electricity meters and supplement it with the potential traffic requirements brought by introducing enhanced Smart Meters, i.e., meters with PMU-like capabilities. Our study shows how GSM/GPRS and LTE cellular system performance behaves with the current and next generation smart meters traffic, where it is clearly seen that the PMU data will seriously challenge these wireless systems. We conclude by highlighting the possible solutions for upgrading the cellular standards, in order to cope with the upcoming smart metering traffic.Comment: Submitted; change: corrected location of eSM box in Fig. 1; May 22, 2015: Major revision after review; v4: revised, accepted for publicatio