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CIGRE-146

CIGR Canada Conference on Power Systems Vancouver, October 17- 19, 2010

Smart Grid 3.0 A Grid Ready Approach

STEVEN BERENS, JOHN LOPORTO Power Tagging Technologies (USA) SUMMARY
Utilities are under increased pressure to achieve cost-effective asset management to improve reliability, integrate renewable energy resources (particularly those located at customer sites or microgrids) and build an infrastructure to support electric vehicles. Additionally, utilities must build all this with open standards, tight data security, and add interactive systems that empower customer-driven energy efficiency. This paper examines priorities for a realistic and prudent adoption of a smarter electric utility network in the right direction and in the right sequence. It is characterized as moving from Grid 1.0 to Grid 2.0 to Grid 3.0. An appropriate communication infrastructure is essential and primary for grid intelligence, now and in the future. It is a fundamental requisite. Previously, communication for meters and grid management was generally created using off-the-shelf technologies and products built for the Ethernet and Information Technology (IT) operations. Moving forward, solutions should employ technologies that are built specifically for the electric utility network. Assumptions on the art of the possible precluded the use of new sophisticated digital signal processing methodology that tag data within the electrical circuit, from point of generation to point of consumption without a secondary communication network and without expensive devices to bridge or filter at each substation or transformer. Utilities are increasingly focusing on improving the efficiency, reliability and security of the utility system from generator to meter. Its a wise direction and the logical first step toward Grid 3.0.

KEYWORDS
-Smart Grid, Future Smart Grid -Grid Distribution, Energy Distribution, Energy Efficiency -Grid Automation -Real-Time Grid Management -Fault Isolation / Fault Resolution -Conservation Voltage Regulation (CVR) -Grid Mapping -Demand Side Management (DSM)

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1. INTRODUCTION
Utility executives responsible for long-term strategic planning or leaders in utility distribution management have been thrown into the uncharted sea of Smart Grid. Rest assured, it is new territory: daunting, unsettled and looming. Setting a course carries large risks for decisions that may be in the wrong direction or in the wrong sequence. In this paper, we will present a descriptive clarification of the driving forces pushing the industry from Grid 1.0, which has adopted many digital systems affecting individual parts of the grid, to Grid 3.0, with integrated systems, interoperable software and hardware, effective security and significant efficiency. Further, if Grid 3.0 is the ultimate goal at some point in the future, this paper examines a realistic and prudent adoption of Grid 2.0 in the right direction and in the right sequence. 2. DRIVING FORCES TOWARD A MORE INTELLIGENT GRID 2.1. ASSET AND LOAD MANAGEMENT According to the U.S. Department of Energy, much of the current grid infrastructure is nearing the end of its useful life [1]. While that statement is true, its not very definitive. What is needed is an accurate picture a data supported map of all of the assets on the utilitys grid. Utilities typically have deployed SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) on their transmission system, including primary substations. However, not all assets are mapped to include: -Accurate (real-time) location -Operating conditions -Life-cycle conditions -Life expectancy 2.2. INTERCONNECTS TO AND FROM EACH ASSET/DEVICE (accurate and real-time) Additionally, SCADA has not been deployed to the end-point of the distribution system the consumers meter or even to the neighborhood secondary feeder transformer. For effective risk management, proactive asset replacement and maintenance must be scheduled in a way that is at the Pareto point optimizing lowest incidence of outage and/or voltage issues, lowest cost of deploying field staff, and carefully timed asset investments. Those are data-driven decisions that are today being made with less data than required and with higher failure risks than desired. Additionally, on-site generation, electric vehicles and abrupt changes in consumer demand now require dynamic load management on both primary and secondary feeder lines. First, as neighborhoods and commercial areas are built out, re-zoned or otherwise change in characteristics, the load on feeder lines may become unbalanced. Second, although both electric vehicles and on-site generation should be installed according to the utilitys interconnect policies, there may be occasions when back-feeding presents a risk to line workers. This is especially true for early adoption of electric vehicles and during extended power outages, when customers might deploy backup generation. 2.3. RELIABILITY Both regulators and consumers are raising the standard for grid efficiency. That is, both their expectations and their actual requirements are greater than they were even a decade ago, let alone 20, 40 or 80 years ago, when much of the infrastructure was installed. Younger consumers with more digital dependency and lower tolerance for momentary outages are defining an outage as any interruption of service. Commercial, retail and manufacturing are similarly dependent on an absolutely constant flow of nearly perfect voltage as their digital lifeblood. These consumers experience very real financial loss from any electricity interruption. In fact, power outages cost Americans $150 billion annually [3].

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Utility operational data needs to reach further into the secondary distribution system, needs to be more granular, and needs to be geo-location accurate. It needs to be more real-time in order to anticipate an actual outage and avoid truck-rolls on issues that are clearly within the customers premise. 2.4. CONSERVATION FIRST As utilities struggle to gain approval for rate cases based on AMI technologies that primarily help utilities bill more effectively, the observant organizations are looking at efficiency and reliability measures for the grid that drive an immediate return on assets deployed. The ability to make the grid itself more intelligent, Smart Grid 2.0, allow providers to more effectively manage the distribution grid and in turn deliver a 4 - 8% savings of energy on the grid. It is this driving and obvious return that provides the platform for a more flexible grid and the new applications that will deliver better integration of renewable energy, management of electric vehicles, and ubiquitous demand side management. 2.5. RENEWABLE PORTFOLIO STANDARDS As of December, 2009, 36 states had already set renewable or alternative energy portfolio standards [4-5]. Though varying by locale, regulatory pressure is relentlessly driving toward generation resources that are both desirable (for environmental reasons) and problematic (for business reasons). Electric utilities will increasingly invest in new energy resources to meet added demand, to supplant more expensive fuel sources, and eventually to replace aging traditional coal generation. The best places for non-traditional energy generation are not the traditional places with transmission infrastructure already in place. SCADA implementation would normally handle data exchange from large installations, but the level and type of information needed to properly integrate these resources is much more complex than has been traditionally monitored. Micro-sites, such as residential rooftop solar and household-scale wind must also be integrated, wherever regulators have authorized net metering. This is again further out and more granular than distribution management at the present time. Integrating supply from wind resources is challenging, due to the intermittency of the energy. Recent studies report that the overall impact of wind energy on a utilitys system will be negligible, and may be managed with capacitors and batteries, resulting in overall load balancing and system benefits [6]. However, achieving these benefits will again require discrete and real-time data at a level not typically provided by SCADA.
As the first central-station power plant was constructed in 1882, the bottom line on renewables we live in a more exacting, more data-driven, and more real-time world than our outdated infrastructure can handle.

2.6. PHEV / PEV The utilitys smart meter will need to distinguish between a clothes dryer and an electric vehicle. The consumption of each appliance will likely be billed at different TOU rates, and each might be remotely demand-controlled, limiting times when the device can draw power. Whether new tariffs advance as quickly as vehicle technology and meter technology, the two-way communication pathway to deliver signals and usage data must be reliable, cost-effective, end-point-aware and deployed before the consumer plugs in his EV. Just as with renewable energy supply, the electric vehicle challenges utilities to prepare for unique problems and opportunities. Electric vehicles also provide an opportunity for a new and different service to the consumer fuel cost data management. The roaming EV should be compared to a roaming mobile phone. This is a much simpler billing method than equipping all charging units with meters, and reduces infrastructure costs at charging stations. By putting the meter on the vehicle and identifying the vehicle with a single energy consumer, the utility can collect and bill all vehicle-related power costs and credits, regardless of where the vehicle was charged or where it provided frequency regulation or back-up power.

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The collective increased load due to electric vehicle charging is not likely to have a significant impact on the overall grid. But the devil is in the details or in this case, the local distribution system. Distribution systems at the neighborhood level are generally sized for predictable loads. Electric vehicle charging wasnt part of that prediction. Even if EVs are charged only at night, pockets of EV popularity (such as moderately affluent housing developments) could have a dangerous, localized impact. Real-time data that characterizes both the quantity and type of load allows intelligent circuit balancing. This improves the operating characteristics of distribution assets and reduces the risk of outages. The upside of EVs, with its own set of problems, is energy storage, also called V2G vehicle-to-grid. EVs may serve as mobile batteries charge them up on off-peak power and draw on them during peak hours [7]. To do this, the consumer will connect the vehicle through a smart plug, and the utility will need to deploy two-way communication and two-way power delivery. Vehicles with two-way power control can also provide frequency regulation, or power balancing, which is a service the consumer provides to the utility. Frequency regulation assists in leveling out variance in the power as distributed resources (wind and solar) come onto the grid, and peak demand (air conditioning, household appliances, retail and industrial load) is drawn off. But each V2G unit is another data source to be monitored and managed with accurate, real-time, location-aware sensors that communicate to the utility as an integral part of the distribution system. 3. STRUCTURAL CHANGE WHILE MEETING TRADITIONAL REQUIREMENTS Much of the Smart Grid conversation today is focused on the consumer end of the grid. To be sure, Smart Grid 3.0 will create a new relationship between the consumer and electricity. Rather than simply flip the switch and pay the bill, smart meters, in-home devices, home-area-networks, (and their parallels in commercial and industrial sectors) offer the technology, the social/market awareness, and the cool factor that make this part of the grid easier to talk about and easier to understand. Its been well-funded, too, across both start-ups and blue-chips. Perhaps in-home and online data, such as Microsoft Hohm, are a method of securing regulatory cost recovery for AMI (advanced metering infrastructure) investments. This is a tangible ratepayer benefit. A truly prudent investment, however, is in reliability. More than anything, the utility is in the risk management business reliability, asset optimization and conservative cost management. What if one could prudently invest in reliability and asset optimization, lay the groundwork for bringing renewable resources online, prepare the distribution network for managing grid-connected on-site generation and electric vehicles, and reduce the time between investment and payback? Compare well-touted smart grid goals against todays priorities. That is, match the utilitys prioritization strategy against its risk management. For example, the U.S. Department of Energy booklet The Smart Grid: An Introduction describes a path from today through the smarter grid to the future. The smarter grid offers valuable technologies that can be deployed within the very near future, or are deployed today In the short term, a smarter grid will function more efficiently, enabling it to deliver the level of service weve come to expect more affordably in an era of rising costs, while also offering considerable societal benefits such as less impact on our environment. This smarter grid is what we refer to as Grid 2.0, and is achievable with investments that meet todays priorities as well as those of the future. 4. GOALS AND HURDLES The vision of that future grid, Grid 3.0, has been universally described as meeting the following goals: -Increase grid efficiency, reliability and security -Increase integration of renewable resources -Enable consumer empowerment for end-use energy management -Reduce overall energy consumption -Support transportation shift from oil to electricity

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There are indeed challenges and hurdles on the course ahead. To over-simplify, the primary challenges are in immature standards and uncertain regulatory support. While smart grid standards are not yet settled and communication technologies are competing for attention, the U.S. Department of Energy has directed the National Institute of Standards and Technologies (NIST) to lead a collaborative working group with a goal of producing a set of smart grid interoperability and communication standards by year-end 2010 [8]. NISTs work covers a broad array of smart grid priorities, from demand response and distribution grid management to electric transportation and cyber-security. Meanwhile, vendors and consultants write utility business plans to commit investment in, at the least, advanced metering infrastructure (AMI). For such long-term investments, decision-makers should remain standards-agnostic in their technology selections. State regulatory commissions are reacting to smart grid recommendations from utilities, vendors, special interest groups and multiple federal agencies. Theyre caught between local responsibility and national interests, in a groundswell of progress that is not embraced uniformly by all territories or jurisdictions. A prudent, responsible business decision must be to invest for the future within approved operations and maintenance (O&M) categories that come under legitimately authorized cost recovery. Long-term investments can include a focus on circuit modeling and analysis, asset optimization, outage prevention and integration of renewables. 5. SMART GRID 2.0: COMMUNICATION INFRASTRUCTURE OPTIONS The communication infrastructure is essential and primary for grid intelligence, now and in the future. It is a fundamental requisite. Utilities need a communication infrastructure for advanced, real-time monitoring that is a low-risk choice. One that addresses both todays requirements and those for the next 10 or 20 years, not one that will be technologically obsolete before its paid for. Not one that has proprietary standards. Not one that is vulnerable to security gaps. Not one that is dedicated solely to the meter. Communication for Grid 1.0 was generally created using off-the-shelf technologies and products built for the Ethernet and Information Technology (IT) operations. Moving to Grid 2.0 we should be employing technologies that are built specifically for the electric utility network technologies that are built to control the grid itself, for system and load management. These technologies should be built primarily for operational efficiency, rather than having been built for public data communication. This is the time (grid management 2.0) to move from bolt-on solutions to dedicated design. Power Line Carrier (PLC), Broadband-over-Power Line (BPL), fiber-optics and fixed wireless networks have been available for many years and are established technologies. A new technology is available that meets requirements for Grid 2.0 the smarter grid and compares favorably against the advantages and disadvantages of other communication methods. Specifically, sophisticated digital signal processing carries data tags within the electrical circuit, from point of generation to point of consumption without a secondary communication network. Transformers, shunt capacitors, line conditions, and other native characteristics of the distribution grid prevent BPL and PLC signals from propagating effectively over distance. Transformer bypasses offer a limited, but very expensive workaround. Meanwhile, fiber optics and various wireless network technologies have high deployment cost because it is necessary to build a second physical infrastructure for communication signals, parallel to the electricity infrastructure. In addition, wireless systems have shown to lack the ability to deal with real time data due to multi-hop architectures. 5.1. POWER TAGGING: A SOLUTION FOR GRID RESIDENT COMMUNICATIONS Now digital tagging solves both issues. Like PLC and BPL, it is grid-resident and does not require a second physical infrastructure to be built for communication. However, the new solution from Power Tagging is cost-effective for long distances. The digital signal is configured to pierce through transformers and capacitors, for example.

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By leveraging state-of-the-art digital signal processing techniques and intimate knowledge of grid channel characteristics, Power Tagging signals are able to adapt to individual link-level conditions. This can be referred to as hugging the spectral shadow. Signals enjoy protected locations in the frequency spectrum while optimizing available communications bandwidth. Tags also propagate upstream in the grid, allowing full bi-directional communication without requiring the capitalization of a secondary communications network. In order to ensure consumer privacy and system security as well as optimize bandwidth utilization, the Power Tagging architecture isolates the control and data paths. Additionally, each hierarchical layer of the distribution grid as delineated by ambient voltage is treated as a distinct region in a distributed state engine. Using Power Tagging, every grid-resident device can be located and managed in real-time, using conventional network management paradigms. As a result, utilities have a powerful new tool for optimization of the grid. Distributed generation sources can be balanced with nearby storage devices, mitigating the propagation of uncontrollable power spikes. Demand-side management (DSM) applications can forecast accurately, even to the level of the individual phase of a specific lateral, off of a specific feeder from a specific substation. This allows DSM applications to manage peak loads with far less lost revenue and far fewer inconvenienced consumers. Finally, backhaul communication channels currently present a plethora of standards, options and requirements. New smart meters offer multiple network interfaces to support to support Ethernet, broadband, cellular, Zigbee, and other wireless alternatives. Unfortunately, these technologies are not ubiquitous and not cheap. The one common denominator at every location on the grid is the wire carrying the power itself. Not only does this represent a cost-effective and consistent deployment methodology for advanced applications, it also makes every smart meter Grid-Location Aware as soon as it comes on line. 6. SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION The U.S. Department of Energy says it is charged with orchestrating the wholesale modernization of our nations electrical grid. While it is running. Full-tilt. While the DOE may be leading the charge, utility strategy officers are the ones wholl make prudent investment decisions, supported by regulatory approval, consistent with todays priorities. Focus on improving the efficiency, reliability and security of the utility system from generator to meter. Its a wise direction and the logical first step toward Grid 2.0.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
[1] Age of infrastructure DOE The Smart Grid: An Introduction, page 18 http://www.oe.energy.gov/DOE_SG_Book_Single_Pages.pdf [2] Tolerance for outages DOE OEDER GridWorks http://sites.energetics.com/gridworks/grid.html [3] Consumers cost of outages DOE The Smart Grid: An Introduction, page 5 http://www.oe.energy.gov/DOE_SG_Book_Single_Pages.pdf [4] DOE: Renewable Portfolio Standards http://apps1.eere.energy.gov/states/maps/renewable_portfolio_states.cfm

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[5] Pew Center on Global Climate Change http://www.pewclimate.org/what_s_being_done/in_the_states/rps.cfm] [6] Integration of wind power 20% Wind Energy by 2030 http://www.20percentwind.org/, chapter 4 [7] EV bidirectional flow and energy storage University of Delaware http://www.udel.edu/udaily/2010/feb/aaasv2g022310.html [8] NIST interoperability standards http://www.nist.gov/public_affairs/releases/upload/smartgrid_interoperability_final.pdf

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