A smart grid is an electrical grid which includes a variety of operational and energy measures including smart meters, smart appliances, renewable energy resources, and energy efficient resources. Electronic power conditioning and control of the production and distribution of electricity are important aspects of the smart grid.
Lunetta Provided smart grid systems are equipped with following features.
Reliability : The smart grid makes use of technologies such as state estimation, that improve fault detection and allow self-healing of the network without the intervention of technicians. This will ensure more reliable supply of electricity, and reduced vulnerability to natural disasters or attack.
Flexibility in network topology :
Next-generation transmission and distribution infrastructure will be better able to handle possible bidirectional energy flows, allowing for distributed generation such as from photovoltaic panels on building roofs, but also the use of fuel cells, charging to/from the batteries of electric cars, wind turbines, pumped hydroelectric power, and other sources.
Efficiency :
Numerous contributions to overall improvement of the efficiency of energy infrastructure are anticipated from the deployment of smart grid technology, in particular including demand-side management, for example turning off air conditioners during short-term spikes in electricity price, reducing the voltage when possible on distribution lines through Voltage/VAR Optimization (VVO), eliminating truck-rolls for meter reading, and reducing truck-rolls by improved outage management using data from Advanced Metering Infrastructure systems. The overall effect is less redundancy in transmission and distribution lines, and greater utilization of generators, leading to lower power prices.
Load balancing :
The total load connected to the power grid can vary significantly over time. Although the total load is the sum of many individual choices of the clients, the overall load is not a stable, slow varying, increment of the load if a popular television program starts and millions of televisions will draw current instantly. A smart grid may warn all individual television sets, or another larger customer, to reduce the load temporarily to allow time to start up a larger generator) or continuously (in the case of limited resources). Using mathematical prediction algorithms it is possible to predict how many standby generators need to be used, to reach a certain failure rate. In the traditional grid, the failure rate can only be reduced at the cost of more standby generators. In a smart grid, the load reduction by even a small portion of the clients may eliminate the problem.
