Concerns with global warming prompted many governments to mandate increased proportion of electricity generation from renewable sources. This, together with the desire to have more efficient and secure power generation and distribution, has driven research in the next-generation power grid, namely, the smart grid. Through integrating advanced information and communication technologies with power electronic and electric power technologies, smart grid will be highly reliable, efficient, and environmental-friendly. A key component of smart grid is the communication system. This paper explores the design goals and functions of the smart grid communication system, followed by an in-depth investigation on the communication requirements. Discussions on some of the recent developments related to smart grid communication systems are also introduced.

The enormous economic loss caused by power quality problems (more than $ 150 billion per year in USA) makes power quality monitoring an important component in power grid. With highly connected fragile digital equipment and appliances, Smart Grid has more stringent timeliness and reliability requirements on power quality monitoring. In this work, we propose a change-point detection theory-based power quality monitoring scheme to detect the most detrimental power quality events, such as voltage sags, transients and swells in a quick and reliable manner. We first present a method for single-sensor detection scenario. Based on that, we extend the scheme to multi-sensor joint detection scheme which further enhances the detection performance. A group of conventional power quality monitoring schemes (i.e. Root-mean-square, Short-time Fourier transform, MUSIC, and MBQCUSUM) are compared with the proposed scheme. Experimental results assert the superior of the proposed scheme in terms of detection latency and robustness.

While demand response has achieved promising results on making the power grid more efficient and reliable, the additional dynamics and flexibility brought by demand response also increase the uncertainty and complexity of the centralized load forecast. In this paper, we propose a game-theoretic demand response scheme that can transform the traditional centralized load prediction structure into a distributed load prediction system by the participation of customers. Moreover, since customers are generally rational and thus naturally selfish, they may cheat if cheating can improve their payoff. Therefore, enforcing truth-telling is crucial. We prove analytically and demonstrate with simulations that the proposed game-theoretic scheme is incentive compatible, i.e., all customers are motivated to report and consume their true optimal demands and any deviation will lead to a utility loss. We also prove theoretically that the proposed demand response scheme can lead to the solution that maximizes social welfare and is proportionally fair in terms of utility function. Moreover, we propose a simple dynamic pricing algorithm for the power substation to control the total demand of all customers to meet the target demand curve. Finally, simulations are shown to demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed game-theoretic algorithm.