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Advanced Metering: Middle East and the Way to Smart Grid Era

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Advanced Metering: Middle East and the Way to Smart Grid Era Advanced Metering: Middle East and the way to smart grid era By: - Ahmed Helmy Omar Advanced Metering: Middle East and the way to smart grid era Ahmed Helmy Omar, ISKRAEMECO, Cairo, Egypt Electrical energy consumers are demanding better customer service, better power quality, higher energy measurement accuracy and more timely data. Utilities all over the world are being forced to find solutions getting more information on the population’s power consumption. The Automatic Meter Reading system (AMR) was one of the ways in which utilities were go-getting to achieve these goals. However, the rising needs towards dozens of services and benefits upcoming everyday drive utilities to utilize new approaches introduced by metering industry. Advanced metering management (AMM), Advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) and smart metering are all used simultaneously to fulfill these ongoing requirements, e.g. outage management, prepayment metering, load forecasting, demand response, load control, tamper detection, power quality monitoring, asset management, interface with water and gas meters and many other features that make metering system one of the key players towards the smart grid era. The power generation in the Middle East is growing every year. The Middle East electricity exhibition states that the energy consumption in the United Arab Emirates is growing at an average rate of 10% per annum, more than double the global average of just 4%. Power consumption rose last year by 15%. It shows some important key facts as: • Abu Dhabi power demand is set to increase by 80% by 2012 • Arab nations are to spend over US$120 billion on new power projects between 2008 - 2012 • The number of electricity consumers in the UAE rose by 19% last year • Energy consumption in the UAE is forecast to triple by 2020 This paper introduces the problems facing the existing energy grids all over the world and especially in the Middle East then it illustrates the benefits of building smart grids to eliminate such problems. The paper focuses on the AMI as the key player in building smart grids satisfying customers and utilities needs. 1 Introduction The electric power grids infrastructure has been serving their countries for decades. However the risks associated with relying on such traditional grids are increasing every day. Reliability, efficiency, increasing demands, tampering, security environmental aspects and climate change, are all concerns facing the existing grids worldwide. 1.1 Reliability There have been huge blackouts all over World in the past 30 years, more blackouts and brownouts are occurring due to the slow response of mechanical switches, a lack of automatic and artificial intelligence analysis and lack of situational experience on the part of grid operators. Sun Microsystems estimates that a blackout costs the company $1 million every minute [1]. 1.2 Efficiency According to some researches done in USA, if the grid were just 5% more efficient, the energy savings would equate to permanently eliminate the fuel emissions from 53 million cars [1]. If every American household replaced just one incandescent lamp with a compact energy saving fluorescent lamp, the country would conserve enough energy to light 3 million homes. So imagine how much savings would be achieved in massive population countries. 1.3 Increasing demands Imagine that it is a hot summer with countless commercial and residential operating air conditioners; demand for electricity is being driven higher to its peak. Without a greater ability to predict, without knowing precisely when demand will peak or how high it will go, utilities must bring generation assets called peaker plants online to ensure reliability and meet peak demand. Old peakers are expensive to operate. Whether old or not, additional peakers generate additional greenhouse gases. In addition, peaker plants are assets that sit idle for most of the year without generating revenue. 1.4 Tampering Worldwide, electricity lost due to tampering varies widely by region. The United States probably loses less than 4% to tampering, whereas India reports losses of greater than 10% and losses in some Latin American and African countries can reach 20% [2]. 1.5 Environmental aspects and climate change In a lot of countries electricity is still produced by burning coal, a major contributor to global warming. For the sake of saving environment and keeping climate from dramatic changes, renewable sources of energy like solar and wind must be integrated into the nation’s grid. However, without appropriate enabling technologies linking them to the grid, their potential will not be fully realized. 1.6 Security The grid’s centralized structure leaves any nation open to attack either by natural disasters or by terrorism. In fact, dependencies of various grid components can cause domino effect where a cascading series of failures could bring any nation’s communication, transportation, banking, traffic, and security systems to a complete failure. 2 Smart grid characteristics All these concerns along with others were driving forces to think broader to “Smart Grid” which could be simply defined as a fully network connected system that identifies all aspects of the power grid and communicates its status to automated decision-making systems on that network. Thus, the Smart Grid will be able to [3]: • Enable active participation by consumers. • Accommodate all generation and storage options. • Provide better power quality. • Optimize asset utilization and operate efficiently. • Anticipate & respond to system disturbances (self-heal). • Operate robustly against attack and natural disaster. These characteristics to be realized through different stages [3] • Advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) • Advanced distribution operations (ADO) • Advanced transmission operations (ATO) • Advanced asset management (AAM) To justify the characteristics of the smart grid we have to identify the root cause of most problems affecting most of the current grids. If we start analyzing previous concerns about the traditional grids we will find in the back scene “lack of accurate information”. Detailed accurate information is required as a basic step for accurate analysis then proper automated (or even manual) decision making. 3 Advanced metering infrastructure Advanced metering is a metering system that records customer consumption and probably other parameters hourly or more regularly and that provides for daily or more frequent transmittal of measurements over a communication network to a central collection point. Advanced metering involves more than a meter than can measure consumption in frequent intervals. Advanced metering refers to the full measurement and collection system, it includes customer meters, communication networks and data management systems. This full measurement and collection system is commonly referred to as AMI. AMI is the most important key player in the future smart grid as it represents the connection between energy consumer and energy supplier. This connection is to deliver timely accurate data to consumer and supplier plus the ability to control loads at the site of consumer. Meter data management (MDM) provides utilities a place to store meter data collected from the field. Utilities that install AMI usually invest in meter data management to provide storage for the large number of meter readings that will be collected each year per meter. If utilities select hourly interval data, this results in 8,760 meter readings per meter year, compared to 12 each year for a meter that is read once per month. For a utility of even modest size, the storage requirements and data processing can become substantial [4]. Meter data management can also be configured to meet the specific requirements of other utility applications. For example, with meter data management, meter data can be provided in the same manner to all applications, or it can provide data in the exact form that each application requires. If the utility bills residential customers on the total usage for the billing period, the meter data management can total all of the daily reads to provide the billing system the total usage for each customer. 4 AMI: Fast steps towards smart grid The new developed systems by worldwide leaders in energy metering and management offers both energy consumer and supplier a lot of features to improve the current grid capabilities towards smart grid. The next sections will discuss some of these key features. 4.1 Enhancing demand response: Demand response refers to actions by customers that change their consumption (demand) of electric power in response to price signals, incentives, or directions from grid operators by providing consumers with valuable information for better decisions on when and how to use energy [4]. Metering manufacturers offer now the in-house display providing the consumer the ability to monitor his consumption, the cost, current tariffs. Moreover, the in-house display allows switching on/off remotely different home appliances to achieve better consumption reduction responsiveness. Fig. 1 In-House wireless display AMI enables verifying different demand response technologies as [4]: • Incentive-based: these programs offer payments for customers to reduce their electricity usage during periods of system stress. By adjusting or curtailing a production process, shifting load to off-peak periods, or running on-site distributed generation. Customers can reduce the level of demand that they place on distribution networks and the electric grid.
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