Energy Conservation of Smart Grid System Using Voltage Reduction Technique and Its Challenges

Abstract

Energy conservation has become crucial due to the present energy crisis in the world. To resolve such crises and reduce peak hours' electricity demand, the conservation voltage reduction (CVR) technique is frequently implemented in the power grid system. In this paper, experimental work along with simulation has been done to conserve energy by employing the CVR technique in a smart grid (SG). To verify the simulation result, an Arduino-based SG has been designed with a real-time clock (RTC) and Wi-Fi module esp8266. A program has been developed and burnt into a microcontroller integrated circuit (IC) of an Arduino board that senses day-to-day peak and/or off-peak hours of electricity consumption. The intelligent program that has been put in the system to control the switching of triode for AC (i.e., TRIAC) with an optocoupler to vary the firing angle α (0-π). At peak hours the developed system optimizes the output supplied voltage to load and it results in lesser supplied power at load. The energy consumption data is then sent to the ThingSpeak cloud for remote monitoring. Data aggregation and analytics can be done on ThingSpeak to estimate the energy consumption trend and according to the trend distribution management can notify the generation section for demand management. It has been found that the CVR technique is feasible in RTC-based SG systems which conserves 8.33 % energy by considering 2 ms as an optimized firing delay while the CVR factor = 1. The developed RTC-based SG could be useful in mitigating the present energy crisis in developing countries.