A Smart Grid Testbed: Design and Validation

The concept of smart grid is a form of electricity network that will deliver electricity from distributed suppliers to consumers, with the help of two-way digital communications that will control the energy storage and distribution process. This will save energy, reduce costs, and increase reliability in the presence of failures. The transformation of an existing traditional centralized electricity grid into a state-of-the-art smart grid will need innovation in a number of dimensions, such as seamless integration of renewable energy sources, management of intermittent power supplies, realtime demand response, dynamic energy pricing strategy, self-healing for disruption resilience, information communication infrastructure, etc. The grid configuration will need to change from the centralized power broadcasting network into a more distributed, dynamic, and robust network with two-way energy transmission. Another necessary component for smart grid is distributed information network, which will measure the status of the entire or part of the power grid, and will control the energy flow according to defined policies. With such significant changes required in architecture and operations, the need of a practical and laboratory-based research environment becomes valuable. In this work we have designed a laboratory-based practical smart grid research testbed, called SmartGridLab. It is an efficient smart grid testbed designed to help the research community analyze their designs and protocols for solving the open problems. This will boost the smart grid researchers to develop, analyze, and compare different protocols and designs conveniently and efficiently. SmartGridLab consists of the following major components: (1) intelligent power switch for power routing, (2) power supplies (main supply and renewable energy supply), (3) energy demanders (e.g., appliance), and (4) an information sharing network containing power meters. Through detailed experiments we have validated the usage of our designed testbed for conducting experiments on currently open research problems in smart grid.