Internet of Things Benefits on Smart Grid

A quantitative analysis is presented here to evaluate the internet of things (IoT) benefits on smart grid operation criteria such as power loss, voltage profile, energy consumption pattern, and cost of purchasing electricity from upstream power system. A sensitivity analysis of growing IoT-based devices on the system operation is studied. Furthermore, the merits of utilizing smart IoT-based systems on traditional, renewable energy integrated, and distribution energy integrated system are compared to provide more understanding about smart distribution system operation under several penetration level of IoT-based devices. The proposed optimization model consists of a multi-objective cost function and corresponding technical constraints. The objective function includes the cost of energy loss, renewable energy generation cost, cost of purchasing electricity from upstream network and the payment for costumer participations in IoT program. The boundary conditions enforce DC power flow constraints, IoT-based device technical limits, generation unit capacities, and energy storage charge management conditions. A hybrid optimization is applied to the problem combining global exploration and local exploitation techniques. Particle swarm optimization (PSO) and mesh adaptive direct search (MADS) algorithm is applied as global and local optimization algorithm, respectively. The results show that the adoption of IoT technology can improve the smart grid operation.