Developing a communication infrastructure for the Smart Grid

The smart grid of the future, while expected to affect all areas of the electric power system, from generation, to transmission, to distribution, cannot function without an extensive data communication system. Smart grid has the potential to support high levels of distributed generation (DG); however the current standards governing the interconnection of DG do not allow the implementation of several applications which may be beneficial to the grid. This paper discusses some of the smart grid applications, and estimates the communication requirements of a medium data intensive smart grid device. Two issues that will become very important with the spread of DG are DG Islanding and DG Availability. For each issue, we propose data communication enabled solutions and enhancements.