Meeting the constantly increasing energy needs of the country and supplying 24×7 reliable powers to all citizens is a major challenge in India. With rapid growth and increasingly rising energy needs of the domestic and commercial sectors, India is working on several futuristic fronts to find credible solutions to meet its energy needs. Smart Grids are one of the several aspects of the solution.
The importance of smart grid is growing because smart grid is able to measure, communicate, monitor and manage electricity. Measuring how much energy a home or building uses is the first step toward a smart grid – a step many energy providers have started to implement. Smart grids span multiple functionalities and options — each utility could be different based on legacy, priorities, business case and so forth. However, the implementation of the technology in India is yet to take off.
India plans to invest billions of dollars into smart grid development over the next ten years to get electricity theft under control. Smart grid market to touch Rs 50,000 crore in five years from the present level of sub Rs 100 crore. This would be fuelled by the government’s plan of setting up 100 smart cities and 500 smart town.
India today is in a strong position for an advanced smart grid infrastructure. A few factors are in the country’s favor:
Growing pressure to improve transmission efficiencies
Increased emphasis on power cost management and reliability
Increasing adoption of renewable energy, including captive micro-installations in industrial and residential spaces, which require options for feeding electricity back into the grid
Rapid IT infrastructure growth across the country, including broadband access
The industry expects a lot of changes in smart grid space in the coming years, in terms of investment and innovation. Although many advantages of smart grid technology are apparent, it will merely be a question of time before everyone agrees to accept smart grids. This is relatively a new concept, and the decision making has been slow. Even companies around the world have just started gaining experience in smart grid technologies. Then there are no established standards for communication with a smart meter.
Dr. Kannan Tinnium, IEEE Senior Member and Technology Leader, Electrical Technologies & Systems, GE Global Research shares how to make grid efficient.
“Today in India, the total generation is approximately around 2,70,000 MW. The total amount of generation that is coming from wind is about 25,000 MW and the total amount of generation coming from solar is 4,000-4,500 MW. And in the next 7 years, the government has very ambitious plans to increase the renewables to almost like 1,75,000 MW and that’s going to be a huge deal because if we end up adding 1,00,000 MW of solar in our Indian power system and about 60,000 or so MW of wind, that’s going to have a big impact on our grid.
So we have to make sure that the grid is capable of handling this large amount of renewables and this is again one of the areas where power electronics and controls will play a big role.
Now when it comes to the transmission sector of India, many of you may know that India had faced a major blackout back in July of 2012 and that has triggered a lot of interest to figure out how we can prevent such blackouts by bringing in new technologies such as synchro phasers or phaser measurement units into the grid. The government has ambitious plans in this area to install about 1,700 phaser measurement units and the main challenge that we would face is to figure out how to get all the data out of these phaser measurement units.
How do you communicate this data to the control centre? And how do you analyse this data to a level where the grid operators can get a good feel for how far the grid is away from collapse. And these are all very exciting areas to be working on.
And when it comes to the distribution side of things, one of the big challenges in India is the losses especially the ATNC losses and this is continuing to be a big challenge or opportunity for technology to play a role to figure out how you can reduce the losses by leveraging the communication sensing and all the analytics to ensure that the utility operators have a good feel for how to make the grid more efficient. I would say from a smart grid perspective, it’s an effort to make the system better or smart and this is a great opportunity for India to leap frog and some of these technologies can really drive this forward per se.”
India Smart Grid – Opportunities and Challenges
“It is high time that we start looking at smart grid as a necessity then an opportunity.”
Abhed Misra, System Applications Lead – MCU and LPRF, Texas Instruments India
There are many ways to look at Smart Grid reality in India. However, there are many challenges to it. As per power ministry, over 18000 villages in India are still un-electrified. Therefore, it becomes even more important to ensure minimal pilferage in power usage in form of tamper or theft, wrong billing and delayed payment. In addition, India having natural advantage of being close to equator gets abundant supply of solar power, and if harnessed efficiently can source all our basic needs sufficiently.
In the entire ecosystem of power generation to distribution and consumption, there are several critical components which need to be in closed loop and sync. Those critical components essentially include:
Smart Street Lights
HT, DT and residential smart meters.
Measured and Metered Data collection from all smart meters
Methodology and theft prevention with identification
Billing and payment
Street lights are one of the components which are a no-return investment by DISCOMs, but it becomes critical from its time of operation and theft prone installation. All street lights need to be smart enough to operate in needful hours, which is realised by logics of:
Day or night
Dimming in case of no traffic or occupancy
Alternate street light switch off on Full moon day
Detect and alarm the utility for theft
With Low power connectivity and metering solutions this becomes very easily possible and quickly achievable.
Utilities also can look on net-zero solutions which involve independent street light installations with solar panel and battery charging. The street light only uses power which it harnesses or stores locally, as there is no load on the grid. This lowers down the burden on grid and eliminates the chances of theft.
Then comes the energy meters which gauges huge data and give us all the tools we need to audit and analyse the pilferage spots and reasons. Technologies like low power RF connectivity gets integrated inside energy meters in a very small form factor, thereby, allowing each node to connect and get controlled from central server. With IP connectivity in standards like 6LowPAN each meter becomes unique in the entire world. The day is not far when companies across world are going to outsource their billing, auditing and control to some other nation connected to the installed network of metes via cloud.
Pre-payment meters should be seriously looked upon as an alternative for areas which are or consumers who are regular defaulters in billing payments. Each utility has to pay or spend in advance to buy or generate the power. , The defaulters thereby get a lease time of a few months that lessens the burden and avoids huge losses..
These ideas and solutions can definitely help to address challenges to some extent.
As there is a long way to go in rural electrification and power generation capacity, it is very evident that smart grid opportunity in India is substantial. With smartness getting integrated with each and every component in the eco-system of Grid, there is a huge opportunity for business, technology and innovation.
Even in urban areas the existing installation of mechanical and electronic meters need to be replaced by smart meters. To explain this, the conventional halogen bulb street light with manual control and no theft control have to be replaced by LED street lights which are connected wirelessly and have intelligence of theft control and hours of operation.
And, it becomes even bigger for the savings involved in it. This opportunity gets extended to the common man also by allowing each consumer to install solar panels on their home roof top and source the surplus power left after their total usage to grid.
It is high time that we start looking at smart grid as a necessity then an opportunity. With an exponentially increasing demand of power, the supply and pilferage needs to be catered with whatever it takes. Utilities should join hands with technology leaders like Texas Instruments who cater to each and every block of the smart grid eco-system completely and comprehensively. There can be proof of concept projects to evaluate the budding technologies jointly before using them on large scale. A deep dive into the detailed feasibility study can be done before adopting any standard or part of it in any technical specifications.
Saurabh Goswami, Sr. Manager, General Purpose Sales and Marketing Division, Renesas Electronics India Pvt. Ltd.
“Smart Grid is a technology that will solve many issues once it becomes a reality in India”
Saurabh Goswami, Sr. Manager, General Purpose Sales and Marketing Division, Renesas Electronics India Pvt. Ltd.
The Indian power system is the 4th largest in the world however per-capita power consumption is less than 25% of the average power consumed by the rest of the world (source: Smart Grid Bulletin Vol 2, Issue 12, 2015).This implies that we need to streamline the generation, transmission and distribution of grid power to achieve the mission of “power to all”. Smart grid solutions will help monitor, measure and control the power in real time and thereby significantly reducing the losses. Power management during peak load conditions, efficient roll-out of electric vehicle program, integration of renewable sources, and smart monitoring and control action all this is possible only through the smart infrastructure along with IT integration via smart grid solutions.
Smart Grid Vision and Roadmap for India was released by Ministry of Power, Government of India in August 2013. Since then the industry has been experimenting with deployment of various technology trials and policy reformations. The government has also constituted India Smart Grid Task Force (ISGTF) of experts from entire eco-system from utility to technology provider, to advice Ministry of Power on guidelines and policies to accelerate the development of smart grid in India. This is an opportunity for all from utilities to power distribution along with many more intelligent technology and software applications provider.
The scope of application is broad and multi-branched, and it is hoped that the adoption of smart grids will give rise to a variety of new services and industries. Some of the businesses include power storage and management systems, adaptive billing systems, smart metering systems, remote meters, intelligent home appliances and control systems and also safety and security systems for power theft.
Challenges: With a variety of power generation technologies and country’s aggression for adoption of renewable sources, the traditional grid has many inconsistencies and a loose infrastructure to support growing power requirement. There are ‘n’ number of power injection points as well as millions of consumption points. Power security is another challenge on the traditional grid. Transmission & distribution loss still remains on top of all the challenges.
A lot of effort and technology trails are put in to overcome the challenges and design a smart and reliable solution. It will need us to take small steps. At the consumer side we need to have smart meters with communication abilities. This will enable the consumers to monitor their energy consumption patterns and take necessary actions.
The utility will also be able to offer its consumers demand response which is beneficial for both utilities and the consumers. Some utilities have experimented with this and have achieved satisfactory response. Peak load demand was reduced as consumers reduced their consumption in peak hours voluntarily to avail the tariff incentives offered in return.
Renesas, with its global experience in Metering and communication solutions is actively contributing to the government’s Smart grid vision together with its partners with dedicated products, as a solution provider. For Smart Meters Renesas offers its RL78/I1B and RL78/i1C platform conforming to DLMS based on IS15959 specifications.
On the communication side, Renesas also contributes with solution for Power Line communication (PLC) with support for both G3 and Prime standards on the same hardware, based on its Cool Phoenix platform allowing flexibility of design to its customers, some of which have been deployed successfully in some parts for Europe.
Renesas also supports Sub GHz ( 865-867 MHz) dedicated system on Chip device , the RL78/G1H delivering lowest power consumption for transmission and reception with additional benefit of the need for lesser external components vs other solutions in the market and is working with its partners to provide RF radios for AMR in Smart Grids.
Meeting the constantly increasing energy needs of the country and supplying 24×7 reliable powers to all citizens is a major challenge in India. With rapid growth and increasingly rising energy needs of the domestic and commercial sectors, India is working on several futuristic fronts to find credible solutions to meet its energy needs. Smart Grids are one of the several aspects of the solution.
“It is high time that we start looking at smart grid as a necessity then an opportunity.”
