168 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SMART GRID, VOL. 1, NO. 2, SEPTEMBER 2010
Smart Transmission Grid: Vision and Framework
Fangxing Li, Senior Member, IEEE, Wei Qiao, Member, IEEE, Hongbin Sun, Member, IEEE,
Hui Wan, Member, IEEE, Jianhui Wang, Member, IEEE, Yan Xia, Member, IEEE, Zhao Xu, Member, IEEE, and
Pei Zhang, Senior Member, IEEE
Abstract—A modern power grid needs to become smarter in
order to provide an affordable, reliable, and sustainable supply
of electricity. For these reasons, considerable activity has been
carried out in the United States and Europe to formulate and
promote a vision for the development of future smart power grids.
However, the majority of these activities emphasized only the
distribution grid and demand side leaving the big picture of the
transmission grid in the context of smart grids unclear. This paper
presents a unique vision for the future of smart transmission grids
in which their major features are identified. In this vision, each
smart transmission grid is regarded as an integrated system that
functionally consists of three interactive, smart components, i.e.,
smart control centers, smart transmission networks, and smart
substations. The features and functions of each of the three func-
tional components, as well as the enabling technologies to achieve
these features and functions, are discussed in detail in the paper.
Index Terms—Smart control center, smart substation, smart
transmission network, smart transmission system.
I. INTRODUCTION
T
HE ELECTRIC power transmission grid has been pro-
gressively developed for over a century [1], from the ini-
tial design of local dc networks in low-voltage levels to three-
phase high voltage ac networks, and finally to modern bulk in-
terconnected networks with various voltage levels and multiple
complex electrical components. The development of human so-
ciety and economic needs was the catalyst that drove the revo-
lution of transmission grids stage-by-stage with the aid of inno-
vative technologies. As the backbone used to deliver electricity
from points of generation to the consumers, the transmission
Manuscript received January 17, 2010; revised May 24, 2010; accepted June
07, 2010. Date of publication August 03, 2010; date of current version August
20, 2010. The work of F. Li was supported in part by the National Science Foun-
dation (NSF) under Grant CNS-0831466. Paper no. TSG-00007–2010.
F. Li is with the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science,
University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN 37996 USA (e-mail: fli6@utk.edu).
W. Qiao is with the Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Ne-
braska, Lincoln, NE 68588-0511 USA (e-mail: wqiao@engr.unl.edu).
H. Sun is with the Department of Electrical Engineering, Tsinghua University,
Beijing 100084, China (e-mail: shb@tsinghua.edu.cn).
H. Wan is with the Lane Department of Computer Science and Electrical
Engineering, West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV 26506-6109 USA
(e-mail: hui.wan@mail.wvu.edu).
J. Wang is with the Decision and Information Sciences Division, Argonne
National Laboratory, Argonne, IL 60439 USA (e-mail: jianhui.wang@anl.gov).
Y. Xia is with the British Columbia Transmission Corporation, Vancouver,
BC V7X 1M8, Canada (e-mail: yan.xia@bctc.com).
Z. Xu is with Department of Eletrical Engineering, Hong Kong Polytechnic
University, Hong Kong, China (e-mail: eezhaoxu@polyu.edu.hk).
P. Zhang is with the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), Palo Alto, CA
94304-1338 USA (e-mail: pzhang@epri.com).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TSG.2010.2053726
grid revolution needs to recognize and deal with more diversi-
fied challenges than ever before. It should be noted that in this
paper the word “grid” refers not only to the physical network
but also to the controls and devices supporting the function of
the physical network, such that this work is aligned with the on-
going smart grid initiative.
In this paper, we summarize the challenges and needs for fu-
ture smart transmission grids into four aspects.
a)
Environmental challenges. Traditional electric power pro-
duction, as the largest man-created
emission source,
must be changed to mitigate the climate change [2]. Also,
a shortage of fossil energy resources has been foreseen in
the next few decades. Natural catastrophes, such as hur-
ricanes, earthquakes, and tornados can destroy the trans-
mission grids easily. Finally, the available and suitable
space for the future expansion of transmission grids has
decreased dramatically.
b) Market/customer needs. Full-fledged system opera-
tion technologies and power market policies need to
be developed to sustain the transparency and liberty
of the competitive market. Customer satisfaction with
electricity consumption should be improved by pro-
viding high quality/price ratio electricity and customers’
freedom to interact with the grid.
c) Infrastructure challenges. The existing infrastructure for
electricity transmission has quickly aging components
and insufficient investments for improvements. With the
pressure of the increasing load demands, the network
congestion is becoming worse. The fast online analysis
tools, wide-area monitoring, measurement and control,
and fast and accurate protections are needed to improve
the reliability of the networks.
d) Innovative technologies. On one hand, the innovative
technologies, including new materials, advanced power
electronics, and communication technologies, are not yet
mature or commercially available for the revolution of
transmission grids; on the other hand, the existing grids
lack enough compatibility to accommodate the imple-
mentation of spear-point technologies in the practical
networks.
Whereas the innovation of the transmission grid was driven
by technology in the past, the current power industry is being
modernized and tends to deal with the challenges more proac-
tively by using state-of-the-art technological advances in the
areas of sensing, communications, control, computing, and in-
formation technology [3]–[7]. The shift in the development of
transmission grids to be more intelligent has been summarized
as “smart grid,” as well as several other terminologies such as
IntelliGrid, GridWise, FutureGrid, etc.
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