Smart grid and WAMS in Indian context - A review

The Indian electricity sector faces many problems in trying to reduce the ever increasing demand-supply gap. Energy losses in India´s transmission and distribution sector exceed 30%, which is one of the highest in the world. Upgrading outdated transmission and distribution systems coupled with the need to reduce electricity losses and theft is driving the deployment of Smart Grid technologies in India. The real challenge in the power sector in India lies in managing the upgrading of the transmission, distribution and metering sector efficiently. From last two decades a new technology Wide area Monitoring systems (WAMS) for monitoring and synchronization of wide area networks have come to the fore as a means to address not only reliability concerns but also operational issues such as enhancing transfer capability in real time, advanced automatic corrective actions like adaptive islanding, blocking/DE blocking of distance relay zones under power swings, better visualization through state measurements, decision support tools etc. The present technological advancements have moved WAMS application into the area of smart grid. Several states in India have already implemented WAMS for fast, reliable and synchronous measurement and real time monitoring of system state of geographically spread power network. This paper discusses various technical issues related to smart grid initiatives and implications in context of WAMS technology in Indian power systems.