Talk to transformers: An empirical study of device communications for the FREEDM system

The smart grid is a brand new power system that incorporates power infrastructures with information technologies. In the smart grid, power devices are interconnected to facilitate various intelligent applications via ubiquitous communications between devices. Currently, communications between equipments are mainly enabled by a centralized supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system. An interesting question is whether such SCADA systems and corresponding protocols can be readily used in the smart grid to satisfy performance requirements of intelligent applications. To address these issues, in this paper, we establish a monitoring system for a Solid State Transformer (SST) in a micro smart grid, Green Hub, to measure achieved delay performances in a really deployed system. Based on our results, we verify that the widely-used SCADA system shows satisfactory performances to meet requirements defined in Green Hub for device monitoring and control. Besides the performance evaluation, we also intend to share our implementation experiences and highlight several significant remarks for the future design of the communication architecture in the smart grid.