Lunch Speech I. Broadband Powerline for Power Distribution Applications

European Power Utilities are facing huge changes these days. The liberalization of the energy market leads to decreased margins as well as national regulatory bodies´ demand for higher transparency. Utilities are in need to gather more information about the actual status and load of their electricity grid. Information, is only decentralized available on different sites within the whole power grid. A lot of different communication technologies are used today to collect all the demanded data, e.g. Narrowband PLC or GSM for automatic meter reading, copper twisted pair for the control of RTU (Remote Terminal Units) or fibre optical networks for SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) systems. For each of these applications a new communication network has to be build up and operated. With Broadband Powerline Communication Systems (PLC) utilities could set up one communication platform for the data transportation of all the applications mentioned above. The PLC Technology enables various IP-based services by broadband data transfer from and to every point of the electric network. And this technology enables utilities to use their own infrastructure, the distribution network, as a communication network. This Keynote will present implementation and migration strategies for power utilities to IP based Broadband Powerline Communications Systems. It will show the aspects on a technical and user requirement based approach for enhanced utility communication. Intelligent network and grid communication for industrial and household application will be depicted with respect to existing communication media and applications.