Smart grids in developing countries: current status, challenges and upcoming trends

DONATO, PATRICIO G.; FUNES, M.; HADAD, M.; STRACK, J.L.; CARUGATI, I.; ORALLO, C.

Advances in Energy Research

Nova Science

Lugar: Nueva York; Año: 2020; p. 85 - 122

Global energy consumption is rising every year, driven by the population growth and the increased dependence of society on electricity. If this increasing electric energy demand is satisfied by traditional fossil fuels sources (mainly coal, oil and gas), the problem of climate change willbecome more severe due to the growing environmental pollution. On the other hand, if the demand is mainly satisfied with renewable energy sources, there could be problems of intermittent energy supply that are difficult to forecast sufficiently in advance.The answer to this growing demand is not only to generate more energy, but also to have a more rational consumption profile and efficient management of the electrical grid, from the largest generator to the most elementary customer. In order to provide an answer to this challenging scenario, in the course of the last decade the concept of smart grid emerged and evolved strongly, driving a paradigm shift in management and control of electricity grids. Among other characteristics, a smart grid is bidirectional not only in the energy management but also in that regards to the information flow, adding monitoring devices and actuators distributed at all voltage levels. In few words, the smart grid can be summed up as the conjunction of the traditional electricity grid with modern information and communication technologies (ICT), including distributed generation systems, mainly based in renewable sources, and microgrids.The biggest transformation of electricity networks is taking place in the most developed countries. Many pilot and demonstration projects have been deployed in Europe, North America and Asia, and millionaire investments have been made for the installation of large wind and solar farms, the largescale implementation of advanced metering infrastructures (AMI), the promotion of distributed generation systems, dynamic tariff schemes, distribution automation, etc. Although an important progress has been made, there is still a long way to go to transform the electrical grids into full smart grids, which includes issues of dynamic and intelligent demand managementor energy storage over long periods of time (centralized or distributed). The situation is quite different in the case of developing countries, where the deployment of smart grids has been put into consideration only in recent years. The energy consumption per capita of the most of these countries has increased continuously over the last thirty years, but not always this growthhas been accompanied by the expansion of its electrical transmission and distribution grid. It is in this framework that the evolution towards the smart grid have started, but conducted with different criteria, and in many cases through a lot of independent and uncoordinated pilot projects, with limited or no support from official agencies.The objective of this chapter is to show the evolution of smart grids in developing countries, highlighting the challenges and trends for the next years. For this purpose, reference cases corresponding to different developing countries of Africa and America will be shown and an emphasis made on highlighting similarities and differences with regard to more matureexperiences of developed countries.