I-Net, the reality of an intelligent distribution network

The Smart Grid has become reality in a district of Amsterdam. The Dutch energy network company Liander (part of Alliander) has made a serious commitment to the smart grid. Among the ambitious initiatives to bring intelligence to the network one is a project called i-Net that set out the objective to reinforce and automate their medium voltage grid. Liander started implementing i-Net in early 2011. Today, its smart grid concept has already successfully been implemented in one district of Amsterdam with approximately 10,000 households being served. The power of Liander´s concept lies in the fact that 90% of existing parts of the original grid are being reused making it financially feasible. The network allows for bidirectional operation and provides self-healing functionality as well as automatic fault localization. In the future, Liander plans to roll out the i-Net concept in other areas in The Netherlands aiming to deploy it in about 20% of its service area.