Over the last century, the distribution of electricity has seen little change. It is a one-way process – power is generated and distributed through transmission circuits to substations and on down the line to the end user. As this delivery system ages and load increases, it becomes more and more vulnerable to energy delivery interruptions, which is estimated to cost consumers an estimated $150 billion annually. In other words, for every dollar spent on electricity, consumers are spending at least 50 cents on other goods and services to cover the costs of power failures. These costs result from losses in affected industries being passed down to consumers. So from this perspective, the reliability of our power supply has an appreciable impact on economic growth and prosperity.

With new communication technologies emerging and the smart grid taking shape, the reliability of the grid will greatly improve in the years ahead. While smart meter deployments are often the first milestone of smart grid technology implementation enabling grid efficiency and consumer engagement, the real-time command and control of higher-level grid devices is of equal – if not greater – value in the push for overall grid efficiency and reliability.

Making the power grid a smart grid will encompass vast changes to infrastructure (communications, applications, endpoint devices), operations (centralized monitoring and control, outage management, video security) and customer relations (home devices, power usage, behavior programs).

Communication networks are an essential, fundamental element upon which to build all of these smart grid capabilities.
The smart grid communications networks must deliver bidirectional flow of information end to end—from power generation across transmission and distribution grids to the point of power consumption and to the utility core network.

Like power, water and gas utilities are in a transformative state—although their evolution is occurring at different rates—and are moving toward making changes to their infrastructure, operations and customer relations, which involves deploying smart technologies. They, too, are building a smart grid. Smart grid capabilities such as smart meters, remote monitoring of endpoints and remote control of devices are all included in the next generation of power, water and gas utilities. Further, the coverage area of these utility infrastructures hugely overlap, which seems like a great opportunity to look for synergy.

The common element for all smart grids is the communications network. Smart grid communications networks for utilities share many common requirements. They must:

• Be capable of connecting many endpoints or varying types,
• Support multiple applications with a range of communications requirements (high-performance down to a few kilobits per second every few hours),
• Scale to provide coverage across a utility’s service area,
• Have robust centralized management and control,
• Have strong security, and
• Allow mobile workers access to information from virtually anywhere in the service area.

Why build three networks for utility smart grid communications? Is it realistic for utilities to share a common communications infrastructure for power, water and gas smart grids?

Some utilities already use a common network for these purposes. Municipal power and water utilities, are deploying a single, wireless broadband network across its coverage area that will aggregate communications including backhaul of smart power and water meters, home-area network applications, distribution automation and water leak-detection sensors.

Some cities uses a single, wireless broadband network across its coverage area to support multiple utility applications including backhaul of smart water and power meters, mobile utility and work force applications and outage management.

A common network that consolidates communications for all smart grids—power, water and gas, alike—can work and eliminates unnecessary redundancy.