Smart grid: An overview and its implementation strategy in India

Electricity is the major share of total global energy requirement, which is expected to be exponentially growing. As the demand grows steadily, not only will the supply become inadequate, it’s transmission and distribution will become inefficient and wasteful. The existing grid infrastructure was not basically designed for today’s pace of power transfer. It has not been updated and upgraded in accordance to the pace of increases in power and itsdelivery. As the power grid network is already a complex structure, the dynamics of this structure becomes more crucial due to overloading. Power quality in today’s digital era is of outmost importance than it was before two decades. A small disturbance in power quality may lead to detrimental effects in production. Similarly there is considerable security risk in the design of grid with centralized generation plants serving end users over long distances. However penetration of distributed generations [DGs] presents new operational challenge. This leads to the concept of building stronger and smarter electrical energy infrastructure that is the Smart Grid. Defining a smart grid vision for India’s power sector is a worthy challenge.