2. TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. Introduction .......................................................................................... 3
2. Step towards Smart Grid – The Intelligent Electrical System................. 3
3. What is an Intelligent Electrical System?................................................4
4. Components of Intelligent Electrical System..........................................5
4.1 Self Healing Network .....................................................................................................................5
4.2 Dynamic Network Model............................................................................................................... 5
4.3 Business Integration Framework ...................................................................................................6
5. How does technology fit in?.................................................................. 7
6. Benefits ................................................................................................. 8
7. Approach ...............................................................................................9
8. Conclusion........ .....................................................................................9
9. Appendix..............................................................................................10
9.1 References............. ..................................................................................................................... 10
9.2 About the Author.........................................................................................................................10
3. Intelligent Electrical System: A Pre-requisite to Smart Grid
This whitepaper presents the thoughts for transforming “as-built” electrical connectivity data into an intelligent electrical system
for “smart-grid-compliant” operational systems. Intelligent Electrical System being proposed is an IT-enabled, information-led,
electrical network that provides more reasons and opportunities for better operational efficiency. It establishes and continually
verifies electrical connectivity between primary devices to meters by improvising the AMI devices. This new system enables self
diagnosis and establishes the voyage towards self healing network. The system architecture being proposed further empowers
utilities in optimizing resource utilization and enhanced customer satisfaction by integrating geospatial and grid semantic data
with the system components like Outage Management System, Load Management etc.
The discussion will address various components, technologies and principles for the working models. It will also address the
benefits and challenges of establishing such amodel to operate in a run time environment.
Introduction
Transmission and distribution systems across most parts of the sphere are still operating on network designs and control
philosophies that are decades old. The electric networks are steadfastly approaching their limits and facing acute concerns as far
as reliability, scalability, quality and security is concerned. No economy, howsoever developed, can sustain its competitiveness
and voyage in the growth path without the reliable, secure and digital-quality electric power. In their efforts to approach this
desired state of network operations, utilities are keeping tab on a bigger concept, i.e., Smart Grid. Smart Grid concept is creating
lot of interest among the stakeholders and the efforts are continuously being made towards preparing the roadmap to achieve
it. Unfortunately, when it comes to Smart Grid roadmap, one size doesn’t fit all! Each utility has to devise its own roadmap and
identify milestones towards achieving Smart Grid.
Smart grid has been recognized as a way of addressing energy independence or
global warming issues and therefore, it is being promoted by many governments. The
then President-elect; now President Barack Obama asked the US Congress "to act
without delay" to pass legislation that included doubling alternative energy
production in the next three years and building a new electricity "smart grid".
Step towards Smart Grid – The Intelligent Electrical System
It has been widely accepted that Smart Grid is a concept and it will continue to evolve. Utilities need not wait for the ‘Smart-
grid-has-arrived’ stage and should continue their efforts towards accomplishing other practical solutions that will provide
immediate benefits as well as prepare them to embrace comprehensive Smart grid technologies, covering wider perspective.
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4. Intelligent Electrical System: A Pre-requisite to Smart Grid
Intelligent Electrical System is an approach in the similar direction. This system would be a pre-cursor for the utilities, enabling
them to implement currently available and more matured solutions that will put the utilities in the path to achieve
comprehensive Smart Grid, going forward. The benefit will be that utilities can right away embark on the journey towards
reliable production and delivery of energy to customers through real-time, automated control systems. Table below provides a
comparison of the benefits of implementing Intelligent Electrical System vis-a-vis Smart Grid. Table 1: Comparison of the
benefits of implementing Intelligent Electrical System vis-a-vis Smart Grid.
Characteristics Intelligent Electric System Smart Grid
Self Heal Partial Enablement
Facilitate Customer Participation
Optimize Asset Utilization
Distributed Generation Resources Partial Enablement
Demand Response &
Demand Side Management
Resists Attack
Digital Quality Power
What is an Intelligent Electrical System?
Currently, due to lack of real-time information the customer comes to know about the energy usage only when the billing cycle
is triggered, that could be anything up to 60 days in certain geographies. Other aspects of lack in information could be issues in
collecting and analyzing load condition of T&D assets, locating exact fault location in case of outages, and slower response for
restoration. It all leads toward unexpected breakdowns, longer outages, slower restoration and un-informed customer.
Leading utilities across the globe are striving for establishing a fully inter-connected electrical network
system that enables reliable production and delivery of energy to customers through real-time,
automated control systems. Intelligent Electrical system is an overlay of information-oriented software
and services on top of the existing infrastructure. It is an IT-enabled, information-led electrical network
that provides more reasons and opportunities for customer participation and better operational
efficiency.
Establishing intelligent electrical system will require the utilities to establish:
Electrical
? grid with series of intelligent devices that can perform self diagnosis and report troubles to the control centre.
Network
? connectivity model and continuously verify electrical connectivity between primary devices to meters, by
improvising AMI devices.
Business
? integration framework to leverage and connect systems for load management, outage management and energy
management.
It establishes an electrically connected network right from the transmission station to the metering point in the customers’
premise and is a practical sub-set of the integrated concepts of Smart Grid, using comprehensive GIS and AMI/MDM systems.
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5. Intelligent Electrical System: A Pre-requisite to Smart Grid
Components of Intelligent Electrical System
Self Healing Network
One of the important constituents of intelligent electrical system is the self healing network.Establishing the self healing network
will include replacing traditional energy metering devices with Smart Meters and series of other intelligent devices on the key
assets in the network. It will allow the utility and the customers to automate the information flow and implementing control
mechanism for optimizing the service delivery and enhancing customer experience.
The exercise will be to deploy series of intelligent devices for monitoring all aspects of the power system by placing sensory
devices on key assets, allowing for self diagnostics of the network in case of system disturbances, suggesting corrective actions
and/or taking automated corrective actions. Advanced metering and sensory technologies will support such an objective by
automating customer service delivery and optimizing energy management. It will support and provide features to the grid for
allowing self diagnostics of the network and initiate the process of self healing and demand side management. Implementation
of self healing network will also need implementation of business integration framework and infrastructure to enable
bi-directional flow of information across the network and control centers.
Dynamic Network Model
Electric network model establishes electrical connectivity from the consumption meter at the end point to the highest level
transmission substations by placing all utility assets in a comprehensive GIS system and establishing the inter-connectivity
between these assets. GIS system acts as foundation for collecting information and attributes about all key assets and displays
them graphically on a contiguous land base. These asset attributes are further utilized to generate connectivity models which
serve as a basis for fault diagnostics using the Outage Management Systems (OMS).
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6. Intelligent Electrical System: A Pre-requisite to Smart Grid
Furthermore, once established, the connectivity model continuously gets feeds during normal operations of the network and
especially during catastrophic outages such as a storm. Utilities need to transform static, as-built GIS data into dynamic network
model. The system should provide outage analysis on geographic landscape and should be able to support applications like real
time network analysis and remote switching.
The connectivity models along with smart monitoring devices also help significantly enhance utility’s ability to identify and
rectify outages. The capabilities can be used to verify exact location and extent of outages as well as optimized mobilization of
mobile field force to assist in power restoration. In case of catastrophic outages, utility can assess which customer segments are
rectified and which are not, and improve customer awareness by publishing appropriate data for viewing.
Business Integration Framework
Collection of the necessary bytes of information from diverse sources will act as the backbone for the entire system architecture.
Utilities need to orchestrate business data by establishing an integration framework and building a communication network.
Enterprise integration framework would include both, the data integration as well as process integration from the various
sources of business and data processing applications.
Further to this, another important aspect in all these developments is to support both interoperability and interconnectivity.
Interoperability supports deploying manufacturer agnostic communication enablement between the devices. It supports utilities
in adopting the products and services from the most competitive vendor and de-risks dependency on any particular technology.
Industry-wide datastandards like MultiSpeak and Common Information Model (CIM) comes to rescue for the utility to facilitate
interoperability of diverse applications.
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7. Intelligent Electrical System: A Pre-requisite to Smart Grid
Interconnectivity would support communication enablement with the devices and applications, at both ends of the energy
supply chain. It would facilitate utilities to adopt remotely drive demand side management, demand response and
onnection/disconnection of services.
Utilities should adopt Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and other standard technologies for open
integration while building the integration platform. This would help in easy integration of existing
enterprise applications as well as future enhancements and third-party applications.
Host of telecommunication technologies (For Example, Internet2, Ethernet over fiber, BPL, 4G WiMax, CDMA, GSM, iDEN, 3G
Wireless Voice & Data, WiFi-Wireless, ZigBee, Zensys, WiMedia) are available in market for enterprise backbone, Wide Area
Networks (WAN) and Home Area Networks (HAN). Selection of a particular technology and/or combination of those is
dependent on the current application landscape as well as the geography over which a utility’s customers are spread.
How does technology fit in?
There is a huge potential for improved service delivery and enhanced customer experience in the utilities industry. As discussed
in the earlier section, lack of integrated flow of information across the teams and last mile visibility of the network poses great
challenge to the utilities. Technology here has a significant role to play. Integration of applications like Distribution Management
System, Energy management System, Geographic Information System, Outage Management System, AMI/MDM, and
Work Management facilitate leveraging modern computing capabilities to deliver highly actionable information to a wide range
of users, all while meeting the organization’s increasing need for real-time information. Advanced capabilities such as network
monitoring, contingency analysis, fault handling can go far in giving utilities the power to be successful.
An illustrative view of integrated technology landscape is shown below:
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8. Intelligent Electrical System: A Pre-requisite to Smart Grid
Benefits
Utilities will experience significant improvement in system reliability, asset utilization and customer satisfaction. The information
network will bring together the necessary bytes from diverse sources, needed to manage distribution network, while
maintaining reliability and quality of supply.
The power of intelligence, unleashed by exploiting integrated information, will help utilities to:
? a fully inter-connected single, contiguous model of transmission, distribution and substation assets that enhances
Establish
reliability of energy supply and power quality to the customer.
? a hierarchical electrical network model with the capability to perform self-diagnosis,suggesting corrective actions
Establish
and reporting to the central control room.
?
Trace geographic network; identify exact fault location; its extent, and thus faster restoration for lower CML (Customer
Minutes Lost).
?
Support conflict resolution, design alternatives and managing right-of-way.
? integration framework for Intelligent Circuit and Outage Management systems.
Establish
?
Achieve Service-Oriented integration of services and applications needed to flexibly support utility processes.
?demand side management and facilitates customer participation.
Improve
?asset utilization by deploying condition monitoring of critical parameters, condition based maintenance and
Improve
dynamic adjustment of operating limits.
?
Cost savings due to greater visibility, predictive maintenance, reduced outages, faster restoration and improved asset
utilization.
?
Achieve the pre-requisite for establishing a comprehensive Smart Grid ecosystem by marching towards operations
excellence, environment friendliness, and reliability & quality of supply.
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9. Intelligent Electrical System: A Pre-requisite to Smart Grid
Approach
The utility should examine the maturity of its electrical network, presence of smart devices (meters, network monitors etc.) and
identify opportunities to establish an intelligent electrical system. Approach should also aim towards identifying already present
suggested components and the possibility to effectively integrate information silos that might be present.
The three essential steps in achieving an intelligent electrical system are::
Conclusion
The intelligent electrical system provides thee utilities real-time information of thee network and the energy supply. It provides
opportunity to identify exact fault location and more organised restoration activity. It enables the customer with most updated
information and facilitates their participation in energy utilisation.
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10. Intelligent Electrical System: A Pre-requisite to Smart Grid
Appendix
References
Books
[2008]. The Smart Grid: An Introduction, U.S. Department of Energy.
Journals
? Ipakchi, Implementing the Smart Grid: Enterprise Information Integration
[2007]. Ali
[2008]. Eric Lightner, U.S. Department of Energy Evolution and Progress of Smart Grid Development at the Department of
?
Energy
? Miller, EEI Annual Convention. The Smart Grid – Benefits and Challenges
[2008]. Joe
Site References
[2008]. Stephen Hadden, Shannon Messer. A Useful Thing Happened on the Way to the Smart Grid: the Agile Grid Web site:
?
http://www.energycentral.com/Topics/T&D Automation/News 7 Editorial/Industry Article
About the Author
Manvendra Tewari is a Domain Consultant working with Wipro’s Energy & Utilities Domain
Consulting Group. He has extensive experience working in energy & utilities domain, both as a business user as well as
consultant. He has been part of various large implementations for operational and support systems and is well aware of the
processes and best practices involved. He can be reached at manvendra.tewari@wipro.com.
Wipro in Energy & Utilities
The Energy and Utility division of Wipro Technologies is one among the Top 10 IT solution providers to the EE & U industry
across the globe. The Energy & Utilities business unit has worked with over 75 top Energy and Utility companies across North
America and Europe in regulated as well as deregulated markets providing solutions in areas such as Customer Carre, Billing and
Settlement, Work and Asset Management and Grid Operations covering all industry sectors --- Electricity, Gas, Oil and Water.
The cumulative experience of over 5,500 person years spans IT Consulting, Systems Integration, Business Process Outsourcing,
Application Development and Application Management services.
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11. Intelligent Electrical System: A Pre-requisite to Smart Grid
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