Definitions of Smart Grids - Power-Globe 2011

Power Globe Discussions on Definitions of Smart Grids in 2011

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It seems to me that the power-engineering community would greatly benefit by a simple definition that we can all understand and that can also be understood by the non-technical general public.?The more the public, policy makers, etc. understand how the energy delivery system works, the better chance we have in successfully implementing significant and meaningful changes.

As far as I can tell, the term "Smart Grid" as it has come to be applied to electric power systems can be defined as follows:

Smart Grid: The electric power system configured ?????with distributed control such that the generation, distribution and usage of electric power can be ?????controlled at all levels by a wide variety of flexible control algorithms.

?Dr. Stephen D. Umans

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The European Technology Platform SmartGrids defines smart grids as "electricity networks that can intelligently integrate the behaviour and actions of all users connected to it - generators, consumers and those that do both - in order to efficiently deliver sustainable, economic and secure electricity supplies."

This encapsulates the key strategic points, without going into the details of particular technologies, which is what we need from a high level definition.

Dr. Chris Dent,

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The trouble of defining what a "Smart Grid" is, derives from the fact that such a thing does not exist yet, leaving apart some experimental installations built for demonstration purposes. So when trying to define a "Smart Grid" we are easily tempted to project our own expectations, our research plans or our actual work on this field. And despite the efforts done by Paulo, some of these elements are present in his proposal for such a definition. It includes more about "what we should like to do with a Smart Grid" than "what the Smart Grid really does". The proposed definition is a definition in a teleological sense.

Nevertheless this definition, however "weak" it could be, has a great value, because it tries to define not the reality itself, but what the reality could become, and perhaps this is much more interesting, because it can help us to direct our efforts on making our dreams come true.

Javier Sanz

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The definition from IEEE Std 2030 - 2011 is "The integration of power, communications, and information technologies for an improved electric power infrastructure serving loads while providing for an ongoing evolution and end-use applications".

Antonio Padilha

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The definition of?Smart Grid that I used in January 2010 at the IEEE conference at NIST here in Gaithersburg was "SCADA on steroids."?Certainly the definition Steve used could be used to describe Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA).?The question for the Smart Grid is how much we need to pump up the SCADA.

?Mark B. Lively

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?Our emphasis is naturally on the grid itself, that is, G&T.?However, my impression is that in more general parlance, Smart Grid is also used to encompass home automation.?Whether or not we want to use that definition is, of course, another matter.

Ross

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The 'Smart Grid' is whatever your marketing department wants it to be... :-)

Alan McMorran B.Eng, Ph.D

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Alan McMorran has a point – smart grid is a marketing term, and a successful one at that.

?A problem is that the implication that the grid used to be dumb is offensive to us power engineers. This offense is compounded by the secure knowledge that the people who use the term smart grid don’t even realize that “grid” really applies only to the transmission system and one or two specialized distribution schemes. We can sense that in the future when a transformer object in the smart grid catches fire, we will have to send a fireman object to apply some fire retardant object!

?The matter of defining the term comes down to this question: for whose benefit are you trying to write a definition? Several people have tried (as your posting shows), with various degrees of success. All have said what it will do, or what it will consist of. You evidently are one of the few who have thought about saying WHY.

?In my view, the sg is just the next step in a logical progression of bringing the benefits of lower cost computing and lower cost communications to the running of the power system. In the high voltage part of the system, we have always been able to justify the expenses of communications and control. Now, with these costs coming down, we can extend the realm of monitoring and control to the reaches of the lower voltage half of the power delivery system –?and even into the home. The benefits are somewhat sparse, however. The system we have does fairly well without!

?But I like to think that the smart grid is aimed at providing improved performance of the equipment “out there,” and allowing things like renewable resources to be managed better. It can give?customers the sort of cost-based system envisioned by Fred Schweppe thirty years ago.

?Because only the term is new – many of the ideas go back at least that long. What is new is the low cost of implementation, and the power of the marketing term.

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Harold Kirkham

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Jeff Shepard [email protected]

?We see three elements necessary for a "Smart Grid": Energy Consumption Measurement, Communications and Control. Those can take place at various "levels" throughout the T&D grid and through the Smart Meter into individual pieces of equipment inside a building.

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The definition of any object is based on its interactions with its environment. If something interacts with its environment like a rock, then it is a rock. In this line of thought, I propose the following definition:

?"A smart grid is an electric power system that can support unfettered bilateral transactions in electricity".

?The word "bilateral" is the key. The present power grid cannot support such operation. It requires a third party (a system operator) to act as a gate keeper for the transactions, so as to maintain feasibility with respect to operational constraints and fair access to the grid, etc.

?The word "unfettered" is in the near future an ideal to strive for. It requires self-healing capabilities that can ultimately render the third parties mostly invisible.

The role of the third parties will become analogous to the internet service providers who are transparent to the bilateral commercial transactions taking place on the internet.

?All other attributes of the smart grid cited so far can follow from the above definition as necessary ingredients on the evolutionary path towards the smart grid.

?Ranjit Kumar

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?I think you take me too seriously. The point I was trying to get across was that you will never come up with a single definition of "Smart Grid" because everybody, across all aspects of the industry will claim that what they are doing is the key part of the smart grid. Ask a smart meter manufacturer what a "Smart Grid" is and you can be sure the meter is the key to it all. A transmission operator will tell you it's about the transmission system, same for distribution operators; renewable energy companies will assure you that it's increased DG and renewable energy that's the root of a 'Smart Grid' and the big IT companies like IBM, Oracle, Intel etc. will all claim it's IT/communications that makes a smart grid.

You will never get a single definition, but if you accept that it's a marketing term (and as Harold rightly points out, a very successful one) that is used to cover a multitude of technologies and ongoing changes to the grid at all levels, then you don't need to spend hours at conferences and meetings arguing over a single, technical definition of a "Smart Grid" and instead spend the time far more productively at the bar!

Please don't confuse my cynicism for the term as being dismissive of the technologies people claim constitute the "Smart Grid". Just because I think it's a marketing term doesn't mean I think we shouldn't innovate, far from it.?To be honest, I don't even think we should stop using the term. I'm as guilty as the next person for putting in the title of papers or projects as I know it's the "in" thing and if you're not doing "Smart Grid" you're obviously not a cutting edge company, right? :-)

To perhaps expand a little on my initial point, the "Smart Grid" is whatever you, or your marketing department want it to be :-)

Alan

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The "smart grid" dialogue has been very interesting; thanks to all for their contributions.

I have little to add, except perhaps this.?Whatever the terminology ("smart grid"; "power quality"; "sub harmonics"; etc), it is important and necessary to define terms.?Otherwise considerable confusion, and consequently technical errors, can occur.

Charles A. Gross, PE, PhD, FIEEE

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?If stability limits are subdued using fast (sub-second) controls, the power systems can be operated to their thermal limits. This was discussed in our papers cited below.

?If there is energy storage (of varying MW and MWh ratings) at all nodes, each line can be operated independently of others.

?As the share of renewable energy increases, the cost of energy and hence the cost of renewable energy sources and energy storage devices is expected to decrease leading to the economic feasibility of such storage.

?Then the operation of the power system would be similar to the operation of any other networked system, most notably the internet. Instead of downloading bits and bytes, we would be downloading joules. Just as we do not check with the availability of data link capacity with the internet service provider before downloading some data/information, we do not have to check for availability of transmission capacity before downloading joules. Just as some data packets may be dropped when the internet is too heavily loaded, some joules may be dropped sometimes, but local storage will fill in such gaps.

?Another example is that we do not check with UPS or DHL before ordering a book from Amazon. We may have a book from Amazon and another one from Borders delivered to us on the same day without even knowing who will deliver it to us.

?Examples of unfettered transactions:

(1) It is possible for one to buy energy at the lowest possible price for a year from several suppliers under various contract types

(2) then take a two month vacation and sell the energy in those two months to someone on Craigslist at an even lower price

(3) then come back home a month early and buy the energy for that month back from someone else on Craigslist at a price that may be higher or lower than the original price.

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1.??????“Assuring Voltage Stability in the Smart Grid”, PES Innovative Smart Grid Technologies Conference, January 17-19, 2011, Anaheim, CA, USA.

2.?????“Smart Grid: An Electricity Market Perspective”, PES Innovative Smart Grid Technologies Conference, January 17-19, 2011, Anaheim, CA, USA.

3.???“Assuring Transient Stability in the Smart Grid”, accepted for presentation at PES Innovative Smart Grid Technologies Conference, January 17-19, 2012, Washington, DC, USA

4.?????“Induced Chaos for an Agile Smart Grid”, accepted for presentation at PES Innovative Smart Grid Technologies Conference, January 17-19, 2012, Washington, DC, USA

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?We do not check with UPS or DHL because the cost of storing a package on a porch is essentially zero.?I think it somewhat of a mis-characterization to assume that the cost of electrical “storage” (meaning the capital costs?of the storage together with the round trip losses of transformation from electricity to another form and back again) is comparable to free storage on a porch.

???In fact, current capital costs of large-scale storage are comparable to are greater than the cost of generation resources themselves, while the transmission system is overall a smaller capital investment than the generation system.?You would have to be positing an orders of magnitude reduction in the cost of electrical storage for your analogy to be apposite, with the possible exception of certain extreme cases such as a demand center at the end?of a very long transmission line with no other possible generation sources in the vicinity.

??Similarly, I am unclear as to your assertion about the cost of renewables.?They remain significantly more expensive than conventional resources unless we price carbon.?Despite continued reductions in the cost of storage, the cost is still relatively high.?Moreover, renewables such as wind may require massive further expenditures in transmission and possibly storage to make them viable at very high penetration levels.

??Best Regards,

??Ross

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Dear friends,

Allow me my 2 cents in this debate.

The Smart Grid concept cannot be discussed as just "more of the same". E.g.: more automation does not change the paradigm.

Smart Grid is a target concept. Systems will be in a diversity of degrees in assimilating the concept, so there is no system is a pure "smart" state. A large shadow area of transition exists, and often people will use the word "smart" to refer to transitional states only.

To call a system "smart", it is necessary to recognize a change in paradigm. In a smart system, there are two things that assume a degree of importance far beyond current average state: 1. A massive parallel communication system, allowing bi-directional huge data and signal flow. 2. The true existence of distributed intelligence in the system.

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This means that, in order to call a system "smart", one must recognize the existence of a new technological layer above all the hardware and software layers already in place. Local control and self-organization of the system will be possible in large scale, thus requiring new devices and new software tools, from distributed computing to autonomous intelligent agents - plus, new ways to keep track and control of the system at higher hierarchical levels, when matters are very much self-organized at lower levels.

So, I do stand in line with all those that believe that the smart grid is more than just a marketing trick. Ah, yes!, marketing and image do exist: some people try to enter the bandwagon of the buzzword with transvestite conventional proposals - but they are just proposing a cleverer system and not a true smart grid.

By the long discourse, you guess I am enjoying my writing and would like to add much more...?

Glad to share the discussion with you.

Best wishes

Vladimiro Miranda

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Thanks to all for the fascinating discussion, to which I am irresistibly drawn, even if it is agonising.

I have (personal) problems with all three words: Definition, Smart and Grids. And so too with them all combined.

Definitions mostly play a role in deductive argument. It is used part of the premises from which one launches on a logic chain, finally ending with a QED (implying “stop arguing back”). In mathematics, and in engineering, this is vital. One truly does want to “prove” that a machine or a structure will do what is expected of it, and often the definition provides that expectation. If your definitions are appropriate and accepted the argument can be very useful. Is this what we are seeking by a definition?

Definitions as in dictionary also help us communicate. But dictionary definitions are really only an enlarged hook on which to hang further meaning. It was, I think, Feynman who said that, as he learned more, it become increasingly impossible to define electron. It was just too rich in possible meanings depending on context, some of which may be contestable (and so worthy of scientific research and challenge).

More formal definitions can also be useful for communicating “received wisdom”, i.e. teaching our “standard model” in a structured and easily understood form. For Feynman the challenge was to do this in a way that you did not have to unlearn anything as your understanding developed. And he put huge efforts into explanations that, he promised, would avoid the need for unlearning.

I just do not see “smart grid” as having real or agreed, or scientific or engineering meaning in the ways that electron does. It is a political and emotive term, and so propaganda. It is not part of a scientific or engineering consensus, and so does not really aid understanding.

Smart is a relative word, and is given meaning only by its context. I think it was originally useful as an indicator as to whether a thing has a computer inside:?so Smart phone; Smart card; even Smart meter all had a comprehensible meaning. It is not used in the context of Smart Appliance, although that could be meaningful.

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Smart always raises the question “how smart?” It is fundamental to IT that “whatever IT can do for you, it can always do much more.” Somehow, once you have moved into the digital domain, there is no ultimate limit. So, once you have got a smart phone, you always want a smarter one. So smart suggests an ultimate solution, rather than the beginning of a further evolutionary path.

In electricity, we are used to investments lasting 40 years, and often a lot longer, particularly when it comes to the main grid components. So we really want to get onto the smarter bandwagon, with product lives of months or a very few years. How long does your smartphone stay useful?

Grid is, for me, very real, and concerns the transmission network. Even here, how far it extends into the distribution network is a bit fuzzy. But it does not extend to the home. Very often, of course, the transmission operator is the “system operator”, which, in the UK is National Grid, thus creating further confusions as to boundaries of meaning. Yet system and grid operation has been “smart” since the foundation of civilian computing, and pioneered many important techniques, particularly in control and optimisation.

A grid is made up of many connected things, some of which may be smart, but at what point does the whole grid become smart. I suspect this is undefinable.

The smart grid term often seems to encompass the home and the meters and our appliances and consuming devices. This is perhaps the root of my concern, and is, I fear, political more than technical.

Grid System Operation is the epitome of “top down” control. Grid System Managers have the responsibility for “keeping the lights on” so when they issue orders to generators they expect to be obeyed. They can also choose to “shed load”, thus plunging some into blackout. Their concern is, rightly, the survival of the system, and they cannot sensibly (or realistically) take into account any special pleading by anybody who might be particularly hurt by a blackout or rewarded by actions that avoid it.

So they represent the relative powerlessness of consumers in their relationship with utilities. Individual consumers have to put up with whatever the utility throws at them, whether in the form of bills or blackouts. There is no question of a “bilateral deal” when it comes to the Terms and Conditions of supply, except, perhaps, occasionally, when it comes to the very largest consumers. It is the utility in the driving seat, and various and complex institutions have been formed to mitigate this power. In the UK, the ideology is that competition will mitigate this power, as it will give consumers choice over at least some aspects of the utility relationship. The competition itself needs institutions to police them, and to do the accounting to enable competitors to share the common grid.

Whatever the power mitigating institutions, they tend not to react fast, so the “smart grid” seems to offer substantial scope for the providers of electricity to extend their reach into homes, and exploit this capability to enhance their profits at costs to consumers, both in cash, and in terms of freedoms to consume as they wish, and not be under surveillance. These will become hard to “claw back” from corporations enriched by them.

The intrusions may be justifiable if there was no other way to achieve a low carbon electricity system. After all, it will normally be appropriate for us to do our laundry when the wind is blowing (and not do it when there is no wind), but this needs us and our devices to be influenced, not controlled by a body that has no understanding of our individual circumstances. By all means let me know how expensive it is, but do give me (and my appliances) the choice.

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Since the smart grid seems to be about enhanced control, the libertarian in me gets nervous. There are better (and cheaper) ways of exercising relevant influence.

There are so many parts to “Future Electricity Technology”, many of which can be given useful and meaningful definitions, that I would seek to define the bits I am interested in, and then say something like: “sometimes marketed under the umbrella term smart grids”.

Regards

David Hirst

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I have just come back after giving a talk on Smart Grid. When I received the invitation, like you my first reaction was to find a definition for the Smart Grid. During my investigations I found that therenis no standard definition for the Smart Grid. I looked through a number of reports and found that everybody has her/his perception of the Smart Grid. One thing that I found common was that the word 'Grid' in "Smart Grid" refers to the entire electric system infrastructure from the generation of electricity to its utilization in the clients', industrial, commercial and residential, premises. In other word the entire power system as we know it.

Now getting to the word 'Smart', do the proponents of the Smart Grid that the power systems that we have now are 'dumb' and it is proposed to make them 'smart'? Smart to me means a passive word that also has an end. Once the power systems become smart (whatever that means), will we stop further enhancements?

Power systems engineers have worked continuously over the past more than 125 years to enhance and improve the power systems. As the enabling technologies developed, power systems engineers adopted them to improve the power systems operation.

Power systems of today are 'smarter' that the power systems of five years back and the power systems of of the future will be 'smarter' than those of today. we will continue to improve them and enhance their functioning.

What we have been and are engaged in is to make the power systems smarter and there will be no stage when we can say the power system is now smart and no further advance will be made.

The term "Smart Grid" or as some corrupt it even further by calling it "innovative smart grid" is simply a buzzword that is trying to put 'old wine in new bottles'. Buzzword or not, power systems engineers will continue to work to make the power systems smarter.

Om Malik

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I’ve been engaged in power system engineering for 40 odd years.?I find this discussion on smartgrid rather amusing.?Years ago when digital protection systems were starting to make their inroads onto the power system, ‘older’ engineers, including my supervisor at the time, referred to them as a ‘problem looking for a solution.’?However, he did caution me that I’d have to ‘live with them.’??It seems to me a similar situation is occurring today with smartgrid …

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W.O. (Bill) Kennedy, P.Eng., FEIC

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In my experience, utility engineers classify any initiative as Smart Grid if they want to get it funded.?It is interesting that the DOE Smart Grid primer goes on for 48 pages without offering a definition – perhaps wisely. https://energy.gov/sites/prod/files/oeprod/DocumentsandMedia/DOE_SG_Book_Single_Pages.pdf

?I get easily confused with terminology. For example, I’m not sure what is meant by using “modern” in front of artistic terms such as “modern art” and “modern dance.” I find it much easier to substitute “modern” for “crappy,” and all is clear to me!??Similarly, when I hear “smart grid” I simply replace it with “PMUs + DA + AMI.”

?Richard E. Brown, PhD, PE

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?Two points are worth noting. The first is that, yes, you can argue that Smart grid is a fad, in the same way as the wave of publications with the title: ”A microprocessor-based ….”. In my opinion, these papers made germane contributions to our area. I therefore would anticipate that Smart Grid would be the basis for many new advancements in the area. Second, as a power engineering educator, I have witnessed the erosion of support for power engineering research and education through neglect, and yes, I will stick my neck out and say the our power industry has not been as supportive of our area as our colleagues in other areas (telecom, electronics.) Look at our decimated ranks in the many Departments of Electrical Engineering. Now, enter Smart Grid and all of sudden, our area is attracting new funding and interest. I may not understand Smart Grid, but I welcome its contribution to our area.

?M. E. El-Hawary

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?I am glad you put out that point of view about the new interest in Power Systems. ?It is from actual experience that I stated, in a previous message, that the Smart Grid is indeed a new concept, a new paradigm - not from wishful thinking, but from the lessons received in the actual development of a new system.

My organization INESC TEC and I have been involved in the actual implementation of the Smart Grid concept, and now a city in Portugal (évora) with 33,000 consumers in fully equipped and operated under that paradigm, with smart Energy Boxes in each household with a local agent controling the loads, the local PV (or wind, or diesel, or other) generation, assuring telemetering, receiving price/tariff and control signals, as well as also allowing battery charging of electrical vehicles, etc.

INESC TEC was in charge of developing the technical specifications. Industrial partners manufactured new devices, software houses implemented new applications and EDP, the national utilty, directed the project, implemented and operates the system.

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In order to achieve this, I can tell you that we had to attract to the project experts and students from areas from power systems to telecommunications, machine learning and computer science. A new interest in the power system area arose and has been developing ever since, in industry and also in the University.

?Vladimiro

PS: Allow me to recall my previous statements:

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To call a system "smart", it is necessary to recognize a change in paradigm. In a smart system, there are two things that assume a degree of importance far beyond current average state in the industry: 1. A massive parallel communication system, allowing bi-directional huge data and signal flow. 2. The true existence of distributed intelligence in the system.

This means that, in order to call a system "smart", one must recognize the existence of a new technological layer above all the hardware and software layers already in place. Local control and self-organization of the system will be possible in large scale, thus requiring new devices and new software tools, from distributed computing to autonomous intelligent agents - plus, new ways to keep track and control of the system at higher hierarchical levels, when matters are very much self-organized at lower levels

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Prof. Vladimiro Miranda

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?I was the one that defined the smart grid as "an electric power system that can support unfettered bilateral transactions in electricity" in this string of messages on the subject. I pointed out that "bilateral" and "unfettered" are the key words and that all other attributes mentioned in connection with the smart grid will follow from realization of a smart grid defined above. I also pointed out that for this purpose, (a) stability problems have to be completely subdued (b) there should be storage of various capacities at all locations of the system. This generated several responses regarding the cost of storage being too high, etc.

I went away from the discussion because (a) I was too busy with other business and (b) I thought I have said enough. However, I want to point out that I used storage as an easy thing for understanding the functional requirement. If we see storage as basically a deferment of demand, then the cheapest way to accomplish that is not by actual storage but by intelligent coordination of supply and demand. For example if you want to wash clothes you may request delivery 1kWh of energy in the duration of a wash cycle of contiguous 30 minutes selected anytime within (option-a) the next 1 hour or (option-b)?the next 24 hours. Thsi similar to ordering a book by regular mail or by FEDEX. Obviously the price of the 1kWh in option-a would be more than the price in option-b, Then whenever the "intelligent" washer receives the message that the required energy is available in the next contiguous 30 minute period (akin to a knock on the door by the mail deliverer or FEDEX deliverer), the washer can turn itself on.

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This process is identical to downloading a large file. You request the delivery of the file. The file will be delivered whenever the system resources are available. If they are not available within a certain prescribed time window the request is dropped with an error message.

?Numerous pricing scenarios can follow from the example. The potential variety of possible pricing schemes is comparable to the variety available in on-line trading of stock or stock options.

?Ranjit Kumar, Ph.D.

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A Definition of Smart Grid

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A Smart Grid is a complex web of dynamic relationships involving not just the electrical and information infrastructures but also governments, markets, customers and community values and beliefs. The proper design and operation of such life sustaining systems requires detailed and responsible consideration of all parts and aspects involved. This web of interwoven relationships covers a broad spectrum of technical factors which goes all the way from market prices "down to the wire" of ohm's law.?However, due to our finite ability to grasp the total reality of electric grids we need constantly to improve and develop better models, tools and frameworks which will minimize the shortcomings of previous attempts.?An appropriate design of a future grid is one which acknowledges this variety of relationships and provides a service to society in a way which the technological, economical, environmental and civil society aspects are, as much as possible, equitably integrated. The better the system performs, within its designed goals, the closer the grid will be in contributing to the ultimate societal objective: a sustainable and flourishing world.

Paulo F Ribeiro