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

Abstract

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, the climate change will become more severe due to the growing environmental pollution. On the other hand, if demand is mainly satisfied with renewable energy sources, there could be problems of intermittent energy supply that are difficult to forecast sufficiently in advance. In the last decade a new concept known as smarts grids has emerged, which should provide an answer to a challenging energy scenario. They would drive a paradigm shift in management and control of electrical grids, giving answer to the problems derived from energy demand. 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 electrical grid with modern information and communication technologies, including distributed generation systems and microgrids. The most significant transformation of electric 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 big wind and solar farms, the large-scale deployment of advanced metering infrastructures, 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 completely transform electrical grids into full smart grids, which includes topics like dynamic and intelligent demand management or energy storage over long periods of time. The situation is quite different in the case of developing countries, where the deployment of smart grids have been put into consideration only in recent years. The energy consumption per capita of most of these countries has continuously increased over the last thirty years, but this growth has not always been accompanied by the expansion of its electrical transmission and distribution grid. It is in this framework that the evolution towards the smart grid has started, but conducted with different criteria, and in many cases through independent and uncoordinated pilot projects, with scarce or no support from official agencies. The objective of this chapter is to describe the evolution of smart grids in some 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, highlighting similarities and differences with regard to more mature experiences of developed countries.