Automation for smart grids in Europe

The electricity distribution network has been and still is the center of a technology innovation leading to what has been called the smart grid. This technological innovation mainly centered around the improvement of the quality of service through the installation of medium voltage (MV) automation systems, and the remote reading of customer consumption with the use of electronic meters. From a distribution system operator perspective, new distributed management system software is getting more and more common as an improvement of the traditional Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) system in order to perform analysis (e.g., power flow) on near real-time measurements collected by the field. Again, those systems are fed by MV values mainly coming from the automation system installed in primary substations and—in some cases—from historical load profiles from the metering system, where available. The low-voltage (LV) network—that is, the voltage level where you find most of the distributed generation from renewable resources, new electric loads such as heap pumps, electric vehicles, etc.—has not been involved in a massive deployment of new technology yet. Therefore, it is often not involved in a deep analysis such as the one carried out on the MV. To some extent, it can be said that the LV network technology is still in a demonstration phase. Field and lab demonstrations—like those performed during the 7th Framework Programme European project IDE4L—are a privileged way to prototype and field test new systems for monitoring, analysis, and control of the LV network in order to derive practical business cases for the new technologies to be deployed in the next generation of smart grids.