AUD 100 million Government Smart Grid project awarded

EnergyAustralia has won the smart grid project. A CONSORTIUM led by EnergyAustralia has been named the other day the successful bidder in the federal government's $100 million smart grid, smart city project.
Newcastle will be the main site for the country's first commercial-scale smart grid project. The trial will also cover other parts of NSW including Scone, Homebush, Ku-ring-gai and the Sydney CBD.
The consortium includes IBM Australia, AGL, GE Energy, TransGrid, Newcastle City Council and the NSW government.
Click HERE for a news release.

EnergyAustralia is already working on making the system smarter: see the following examples:

"Building a new communications platform - EnergyAustralia has rolled out 800 kilometres of new fibre optic cables, installed hundreds of communications switches and deployed carriergrade Internet Protocol (IP) technology to connect more than 200 key substations and depots.
This telecommunications backbone is the foundation for a smart grid. It will provide many benefits including greater equipment monitoring and control, allowing better decision-making and earlier fault detection and repair.

Installing smart monitoring devices to collect data - EnergyAustralia is rolling out 12,000 monitoring devices throughout its electricity distribution network. This data will allow EnergyAustralia to reduce outages through faster fault location and preventive maintenance and to work towards managing distributed energy sources such as solar and storage devices. The smart sensors will give EnergyAustralia an instant picture of the electricity network and how it is performing.

Rolling out smart sensors and analytical tools on the high voltage electricity network – This includes new smart equipment at zone substations and major transmission cables to allow better, more efficient management of power equipment and greater automation of the
network."
Click HERE for more details what they do.

EnergyAustralia and IEC 61850 - check the following documents:

NS 178 - Secondary System Requirements for Major Substations
Click HERE for the document

More to come ...