Is the smart grid a good investment?

Electric distribution design and operational goals include meeting customer reliability requirements at the lowest cost. Smart Grid investments have the potential for helping meet these goals, and this paper presents a series of analyses that evaluate the incremental economic benefits of smart grid automation investments. Smart Grid investments provide a number of benefits to customers. Here only benefits that can be objectively quantified in terms of economic savings are considered. Smart Grid automation investments in this work include investments in feeder efficiency, automated switches, and coordinated control of capacitor banks, voltage regulators and load tab changers. Benefits that come from these investments are improved efficiency, reduced demand, shortened storm restoration time, and improved performance during reconfiguration events. The analyses used in the evaluation are very detailed, involving hourly, quasi-steady state power flow analysis over a ten year period for calculating energy consumption and costs, and Monte Carlo simulations for six different storm types. The evaluation shows that similar to other industries, an investment in automation can be justified in terms of hard dollars.