Challenges & opportunities towards smart grid in Turkey; Distribution system operator perspective

Distribution Service Operators (DSOs) play an important role in liberalized energy market of future energy system. Besides their main duty which is delivering electricity to the customer, especially European DSOs are asked to provide infrastructure to facilitate energy retail which can be chosen by customers. In order to cope with this challenge, conventional electricity distribution grids are getting smarter by coupling current operation technologies with advanced information and communication technologies. This provides a better, faster and reliable service quality to the consumer while achieving an immense two way data transfer between consumer and distribution service operator. This paper gives brief summary about the current situation of electricity distribution operators in Turkey after vertical unbundling of Turkish electricity market and privatization of DSOs. Moreover for the new role of DSOs, operational technologies (OT) in use and their integration with information technologies (IT) which form the first steps of smart grid with future challenges are explained.