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This paper provides a study of the smart grid projects realised in Europe and presents their technological solutions with a focus on smart metering Low Voltage (LV) applications. Special attention is given to the telecommunications technologies used. For this purpose, we present the telecommunication technologies chosen by several European utilities for the accomplishment of their smart meter national roll-outs. Further on, a study is performed based on the European Smart Grid Projects, highlighting their technological options. The range of the projects analysed covers the ones including smart metering implementation as well as those in which smart metering applications play a significant role in the overall project success. The survey reveals that various topics are directly or indirectly linked to smart metering applications, like smart home/building, energy management, grid monitoring and integration of Renewable Energy Sources (RES). Therefore, the technological options that lie behind such projects are pointed out. For reasons of completeness, we also present the main characteristics of the telecommunication technologies that are found to be used in practice for the LV grid.

Interest in green energy has increased worldwide. Therefore, smart grid projects to form a more efficient and eco-friendly intelligent grid by combining information technology (IT) technology with the existing grid are actively being conducted. In Korea, a national-level smart grid project road map has been confirmed, and an action plan has been prepared. Despite such actions, there may appear various threat scenarios in the application of the IT to the grid as a reverse function. Security technology is a measure to respond to such threats effectively. The security technology of a smart grid is an important factor that is directly related to the success or failure of the smart grid project. A smart grid is a new type of next-generation grid born of the fusion with IT. If the smart grid, the backbone of the power supply, is damaged by a cyberattack, it may cause huge damage, such as a nationwide power outage. In fact, there is an increasing cyberattack threat, and the cyber security threat to the smart grid is not insignificant. Furthermore, the legal system related to information protection is also important in order to support it systematically. In this paper, the necessity of the smart grid is examined, and the industry’s initiative toward the smart grid security threat and threat response is examined. In this paper, we also suggest a security plan of applying Rainbowchain, the Blockchain technology, to the smart grid and energy exchange. We propose achieving superior performance and security functions by using Rainbowchain, which contains seven authentication techniques among existing Blockchain technologies, and propose the ecosystem and architecture necessary for its application.

Pakistan is becoming a water scarce nation, owing to a booming population, rapid urbanization, and climate change. An innovative approach using smart water metering to achieve sustainable consumption has been applied in Islamabad, Pakistan, to enhance sustainable urban water management. Water supply monitoring was initiated with 20 m installed in residential and commercial units to manage the water supply by the government along with water quality testing. Collected information include one-year seasonal hydraulic data and water quality analysis data through standard methods. The outcomes showed that smart water metering is an ideal solution for monitoring of public water supply. This example case study supports policymakers in the implementation of water metering and pricing scheme in similar developing countries by outlining smart solutions to practical challenges such as the high-water demand of mosques, water rationing, internet connection problems, mismanagement and illegal actions by some customers. Water quality results showed that 83.4% of the samples were contaminated with faecal coliforms in the study area. A public private partnership could make water metering, pricing and water analysis implementation sustainable.

The increasing development of the smart grid demands reliable monitoring of the power quality at different levels, introducing more and more measurement points. In this framework, the advanced metering infrastructure must deal with this large amount of data, storage capabilities, improving visualization, and introducing customer-oriented interfaces. This work proposes a method that optimizes the smart grid data, monitoring the real voltage supplied based on higher order statistics. The method proposes monitoring the network from a scalable point of view and offers a two-fold perspective based on the duality utility-prosumer as a function of the measurement time. A global PQ index and 2D graphs are introduced in order to compress the time domain information and quantify the deviations of the waveform shape by means of three parameters. Time-scalability allows two extra features: long-term supply reliability and power quality in the short term. As a case study, the work illustrates a real-life monitoring in a building connection point, offering 2D diagrams, which show time and space compression capabilities, as well.

In smart grids, providing power consumption statistics to the customers and generating recommendations for managing electrical devices are considered to be effective methods that can help to reduce energy consumption. Unfortunately, providing power consumption statistics and generating recommendations rely on highly privacy-sensitive smart meter consumption data. From the past experience, we see that it is essential to find scientific solutions that enable the utility providers to provide such services for their customers without damaging customers' privacy. One effective approach relies on cryptography, where sensitive data is only given in the encrypted form to the utility provider and is processed under encryption without leaking content. The proposed solutions using this approach are very effective for privacy protection but very expensive in terms of computation and communication. In this paper, we focus on an essential operation for designing a privacy-preserving recommender system for smart grids, namely comparison, that takes two encrypted values and outputs which one is greater than the other one. We improve the state-of-the-art comparison protocol based on Homomorphic Encryption in terms of computation and communication by 56 and 25 %, respectively, by introducing algorithmic changes and data packing. As the smart meters are very limited devices, the overall improvement achieved is promising for the future deployment of such cryptographic protocols for enabling privacy enhanced services in smart grids.

Introduction Improving energy efficiency and reducing energy wastage is an important topic of our time. But it is quite difficult to figure out how much of our total electricity bill can be mapped to which device or at what time the device used it. We believe energy efficiency of normal households can be improved, if this kind of transparency would be available. In this article, we present a system for energy measurement at mains sockets to gain a transparent view of energy consumption for each device in a household. It consists of several smart energy measuring devices (SEMDs) that use a low-power radio protocol to dynamically build and connect to a radio network to transfer power usage date to a server. At the server, the data is stored and can be accessed via web interface. Results Our primary goal was to build a back-end system for an energy metering platform with very low energy consumption. This platform can provide data for a variety of services that enables users (the consumers) to understand and improve their energy consumption behavior and increase overall energy efficiency of their households.

Microgrids present the challenge to reach a proper balance between local production and consumption, in order to reduce the usage of energy from external sources. This work presents a data-intensive solution to predict the energy behaviors. Thereby, control actions can be carried out such as decrease heating systems levels and switch of low-priority devices. For this purpose, this work has deployed an Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) based on the Internet of Things (IoT) in the Techno-Pole testbed. This deployment provides the data from energy-related parameters such as load curves of the overall building through Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM), a wireless network of IoT-based smart meters to measure and control appliances, and finally the generated power curve by 2000 square meters of photovoltaic panels. The prediction model proposed is based on recognition of electrical signatures. These electrical signatures have been used to detect complex usage patterns. The modelled patterns have allowed to identify the work day of the week, and predict the load and generation curves for 15 minutes with accuracy over the 90%. This short-term prediction allows one to carry out the proper actions in order to balance the microgrid status (i.e., get a proper balance between production and consumption with respect to worked requirements).

HD Supply Utilities has partnered with Carina Technology to distribute Carina's Energy Intelligence solution to electric utilities in most areas of the US. The El Solution is based on industry-true Internet-protocol standards. Energy Intelligence provides a strategic migration path that addresses a utility's billing and metering challenges for current AMR/AMI systems and future smart grid initiatives, such as distribution automation, home area networking and dynamic pricing. HD Supply Utilities will distribute the full Energy Intelligence solution to utilities, including the UMD solution, WISE solution for real-time demand response and FlexPay solution for prepaid energy.