Smart Microgrids: Re-visioning Smart Grid and Smart City Development in India

This study addresses the role of Smart microgrids in shaping a “3.0 Smart Grid” to anchor Smart city development. The paper examines how “advanced or Smart microgrids” could contribute to developing an interactive, flexible, and innovative grid in India—one that would use information and communications technologies to increase the independence, flexibility, and intelligence for optimization of energy use and management within local energy networks and to cost-effectively integrate local energy resources into the Smart Grid. In this regard, the paper discusses integrating Smart microgrids with distribution utility “Advanced Distribution Management Systems,” enabling “dynamic” microgrids that interact with distribution networks according to locally based Smart delivery architecture, with a view to harnessing cost-effectively the benefits of distributed resources for customers, the community, and the macrogrid. The paper also focuses on developing Smart microgrid “Infrastructure as a Service Platform” for resource-efficient community development, where microgrids manage and optimize local energy across multiple end-use sectors (power, transportation, water, waste, buildings, etc.). By leveraging data sets that span diverse facilities, systems, and purposes, Smart microgrids could interlink and optimize energy-using functions of diverse infrastructure systems and the built environment within cities. As part of this discussion, the paper will explore technical and regulatory innovations that could spur investment in advanced microgrids and the development of a 3.0 Smart Grid to help achieve India’s Smart City policy objectives.