International Journal of Engineering Trends and Technology (IJETT) - Volume 35 Number 4 - May 2016
Big Data Management for Smart Grid
Gaurav Kumar, Shekhar Jha, Sonal Kumar, Ravit Anand
Abstract – Smart grid has emerged as the most ingenious
idea worldwide as a solution for power demand issues.
Globally, all countries are searching for its effective
implementation. A smart grid integrates the activities of
all users connected to it, be it the producers, end users
and those that do both, in order to deliver the power
supply. A smart grid involves inventive products and
services along with intelligent monitoring, control and
self-healing machinery to improve the connection and
working of generators of all sizes and technologies, allow
end users to play an important role in optimizing the
functioning of the system, provide end users with greater
data and considerably decrease the environmental
impact. The ability to merge green energy generated by
wind or solar has been the greatest advantage of the
smart grid.
3) Inflexible grids: Another problem is that the grids are
inflexible i.e. they can’t support the integration of the nonconventional source of energy. These problems are solved
by smart grids with numerous benefits for both the suppliers
and the end users.
4) Distribution Loss: Distribution loss counts for about 27%
of total energy generated. Distribution loss in India is highest
in the world as shown in figure 1. This is a severe issue as
about 400 million people in India are deprived of electricity.
I. INTRODUCTION
Availability of sufficient electricity infrastructure is
important to assure the maintained economic advancement.
India’s power sector is the fourth largest in the world but
despite that it faced symbolic energy and peak paucity of
about 8.7% and 9% respectively in 2012 and 2013. Only
66% of people in India have access to electricity and per
capita expenditure of electricity in India is only about 1/4th
of the world’s average. The demand for electricity is
increasing rapidly and by 2032 it is estimated to be as high
as 900 GW. With limited conventional energy resources,
India is moving towards renewable generation program. The
accustomed electricity power grids are unidirectional in
which electricity flows from grids to the consumers. This
system faces considerable technical, economical and also
environmental issues. Transmission losses are very high in
India hence, AT&C (Aggregate Technical and Commercial)
loss reduction has become top priority of governments.
II. PROBLEMS WITH EXISTING SYSTEM
1) Poor framework: The current system is obsolete and
incapable of dealing with today’s demand. This results in
frequent network congestions and in blackouts which are
much more costly for utilities as they spread quickly due to
the dearth of communication between grid and control
centres.
2) Opacity: Transparency is required for customers to make
proper decisions as per the market, so that they can minimize
their usage during peak hours.
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Fig. 1. Transmission and distribution loss as a percentage of power output
III. NECESSITY OF SMART GRID
In today’s world when everything is dependent on
electricity, power is a lifeline. This was witnessed by more
than 620 million people in India by two successive power
blackouts. All important services were halted which caused
chaos everywhere. Apart from all inconveniences, there was
a huge financial and productivity loss. In developing
countries like India where power cuts are so common in
regular life, many important places like hospitals, colleges
etc. needs power backup to carry out their daily routine.
According to New York Times “The country which is
considered rising economic power, this massive electric grid
failure was an embarrassing reminder how intractable
problems are still plaguing India: inadequate infrastructure,
crippling power shortage and yawning absence of
government actions and leadership”. Smart Grid is the
solution to solve all problems of energy from generation to
distribution to utilization. Developed countries like the US
have already started to switch to smart grid but it is a
necessity for developing countries like India. Mr. Sam
Pitroda, the chairman of India Smart Grid Task Force
(ISGTF) said, “While it may be difficult to guarantee perfect
power availability, in the current context, we can at least
replace blackouts with the brownouts by providing a basic
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International Journal of Engineering Trends and Technology (IJETT) - Volume 35 Number 4 - May 2016
threshold of power to all households, with which to run at
least a few key appliances.
IV.ARCHITECTURE
The application of smart grid is to provide power utilities
with digital intelligence to the power system network. The
components of a smart grid are smart metering techniques,
digital sensors, and intelligent control system. These
per day. To manage these data, we apply the concept of BIG
DATA.
Big data is characterized by 3 V’s:
1) Volume - Organizations will collect information from a
variety of sources. Earlier it was not possible to store this
information but latest technologies have solved the problem
of storing it.
2) Velocity – Data streams flow at very high speed and it
must be dealt timely. RFID tags, sensors, and smart meters
drive the need to face torrents of data in real time.
3) Variety – Data comes in various types like structure,
numeric to unstructured texts, email, video, financial
transactions & many more.
VI. BIG DATA MANAGEMENT FOR SMART GRID
Fig. 2. Smart grid architecture
components together enable the two-way flow of energy
from power to plug to be automated, monitored and
controlled. Figure 2 represents the smart grid architecture. If
we change the electric power infrastructures into two-way
network built on a standard internet protocol (IP) network,
then the alternative term used for the smart grid is ‘Energy
Internet’. It is designed as a large number of smaller, discrete
distributed plants instead of the single high producing plant.
It reduces the risk of attacks and natural disasters.
The smart grid is a self-healing network, which means
that whenever a major problem occurs, it will restore itself
quickly by isolating the particular line and re-routing the
power supply. From beginning the integration of small-scale
renewable energy source into a traditional grid has been a
difficult task and the problems include voltage fluctuations
and harmonic distortions, which require synchronization of
the source with the grid. Smart grid facilitates the
optimization of these problems by preventing outages and
allowing consumers to manage energy uses, as a result of
distributed generation and storage. This technology enables
the various option to add energy to the grid at transmission
and distribution level. On the other hand, the smart grid
makes better use of renewable sources by providing more
energy storage capabilities to absorb excess production and
release when the wind and solar power dips.
V. BIG DATA
Smart grid provides two-way communication between
customers and utilities using smart meters. A huge amount
of data is exchanged between them. It is estimated that about
800 million smart meters would be installed worldwide by
2020 which will generate approximately 77 billion readings
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There are many different sources in the smart grid which
generates data. These are power utilization pattern of users,
phasor measurement data for situational awareness, energy
usage information obtained by smart meters, energy market
price to reduce the errors in state estimation, management
and maintenance of data for devices in power generation,
transmission & distribution as obtained by intelligent
electronic devices, functional information for operating
utilities and very large data sets not exactly received from
the grid measurement but mostly used in decision making
like weather and geographic information system data.
In last few years, almost all major companies including IT
giants like Oracle and IBM, grid giants like General Electric,
Siemens have started to work on their big data project and
are competing to bring a set of IT tools that are widely new
to the utility industry. Big data needs more compelling
techniques to process the huge volume of information within
a limited time. It involves a number of disciplines like
statistics, clustering algorithms, machine learning, signal
processing
and
pattern
recognition
method.
Presently, the most effective batch process-based big data
tool is Apache Hadoop. It provides platforms for big data
application in business and commerce. There are
controversies in data capture, transmission, searching,
sharing, and visualization. Data is increasing at exponential
rates but the advancement in information processing method
is comparatively slow. In most of the big data applications,
the state-of-the-art techniques cannot elucidate the real-life
problems. New frameworks are required to model
uncertainty and predict the change of uncertainty. We also
face major problems like data security, personal privacy,
commercial secrets, network security and financial
information protection.
Globally, power utilities have divergence in the use of
big data due to different business structures, social
responsibility, etc. Having most operational data, most
companies put the demand side management and user
service in a higher priority. In general, power utilities are
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cooperating with IT companies to develop big data.
Big data will set a major impact on the management of
power utilities due to past deployment of ICT. There are
many challenges which affect the implementation of big data
and smart grid. Major efforts have been spent to develop
more advanced and efficient algorithm for data analysis.
More illustrative projects are required to gain practical
experience, standardize the design and deployment
procedures and minimize risks from new regulations under
a low carbon economy and green environment.
TABLE I
SMART GRID PROJECTS IN INDIA
Location
Implementing
Agency
Details
Bengaluru
BESCOM
The USAID, Ministry of Power, the Central Power Research
Institute, and Bangalore Electricity Supply Company have come
together for a pilot project in Electronic City to cover around
17,500 domestic and business users.
Delhi
NDPL
The U.S. Trade and Development Agency extended NDPL a grant
of USD 0.6 million for a smart grid project in northwest Delhi
intended to reduce blackouts and increase reliability.
Mangalore
MESCOM
Initiated this project in December 2010 with the following
objectives – load management and real-time metering for each
of 250 installations, including industrial, residential, and street
lighting
Kolkata
WBSEDCL
First of its kind Smart Grid pilot in India that will pin-point power
theft or unauthorized consumption in real-time basis.
CONCLUSION
Undoubtedly, the future belongs to the smart grid. The
complete transition from the current system to the smart
grid cannot be done instantaneously. It will take some time
for all the technologies to be developed, components
installed, and systems evaluated before it is buttoned up.
Once perfected, the smart grid is likely to bring the same
revolution that the internet has already brought to the way
we live, work, play and learn. Utilities, in most of the
developed countries, have accomplished a major
breakthrough in terms of productivity, reliability and
efficiency through the use of smart grid technology. On the
other hand, Indian utilities are still lagging far behind when
compared to other countries. At present, their main focus
is on providing energy at an affordable rate but the day is
not very far when the utilities would be focusing on
encompassing sustainable use and environmental
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improvement into their agendas. And smart grids would
play a crucial part in helping utilities in realizing this
mission. So, the utilities would need to invest massively in
new hardware, software, business process development,
and staff training. A smart grid would play an
indispensable role in addressing global issues like energy
security and climate change. After all, a smart grid is not a
luxury in India, it’s a necessity.
REFERENCES
 The Internet of Energy: Smart Sensor Networks and
Big Data Management for Smart Grid - Manar
Jaradata, Moath Jarraha,c, Abdelkader Bousselhamb,
Yaser Jararweha,∗, Mahmoud Al-Ayyouba
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International Journal of Engineering Trends and Technology (IJETT) - Volume 35 Number 4 - May 2016
 How will global energy markets evolve to 2035?
World Energy Outlook Factsheet, International
Energy Agency
 Datacenterknowledge.com
 Powergridindia.com
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_grid
 Indiasmartgrid.org
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