Big Data in Smart Grids

Muhammad Ehsan Ul haq

Shah Mashud Alam

Introduction
Day by day technology is advancing and making our lives more comfortable. Where ever we
look, we see technology evolving human life. Energy is one of the most, if not the most,
important resource of today’s world. Saving energy or using it more effectively is very important
for human life to prevail. In order to do it effectively smart grids come into play.
Smart Grids are energy producing or supplying grids which keeps record of data regarding
energy production and consumption.
Today data is more valuable than ever. With data our lives are becoming more systematic,
because we now plan with the help of data and computer technologies like machine learning
enhance our planning capability.
In smart grids data acquisition, storage and analytics are a major role. The term well defined for
this type of field is known as “Big Data”.
Before we dive into the topic of this paper, let us first go through what Big Data really is.

Big Data is used to define data which is both, high in velocity and high in volume. Although
there are 5 Vs which define Big Data in a more complete manner, but for simplicity
understanding these two will do.
High in Volume, well obviously large data, the name itself implies it.
High in Velocity, this might be confusing at first, because data never had a property named
velocity, but as the days went by, volume was not enough to determine the data completely
because how fast a data grows became another important factor. So velocity here refers to the
speed with which the data is growing, e.g. 5gb/day.

Now we know a bit about Big Data, but what we need to know is that does the data problem in
smart grid fall into the category of Big Data. In smart grid the volume of data is no doubt very
large, this will be explained soon, but also very fast. So fast, that in seconds you are transferring
many bytes of data from one sensor or metre. When trying to analyze it, you need to apply
analytics to this fast stream of data.
There might be one confusion that the data’s growth speed is known as velocity, is the stream
of data the same thing? Well, no!, the stream of data is too fast that we do not consider this as
the velocity, but nevertheless, velocity of data depends on the stream size.
Currently there are two types of solution provided by Big Data tools used in Smart Grids, one is
called batch processing and the other is called stream processing.
We have already gone through streams of data, processing this stream is called stream
processing. Batch is the group of data that you store and once you feel that the batch is big
enough, you process it. In smart grids, the streaming data is so large that we can introduce a
new term for it, called batch stream.
The two tools provided by Big Data technologies are Hadoop MapReduce(Batch Processing)
and Apache Storm(Streaming Data). Both are very appropriate for their respective processing
but the new term we just introduced Batch Stream, these two tools won’t do good with this.
So we need to use a new tool, or new architecture which deals with batch stream.

Literature Review
Data analysis helps in analysing trends from Big Data which human cannot perceive and
Energy is one of the the biggest concern so Data Analytics along which Big Data can help in
efficiently managing the resources, however research is being done in this area. Likewise in
CLOUD-BASED SOFTWARE PLATFORM FOR BIG DATA ANALYTICS IN SMART
GRIDS,by (Yogesh Simmhan,Saima Aman,Alok Kumbhare,Rongyang Liu,Sam Stevens,
Qunzhi Zhou and Viktor Prasanna,from University of Southern California) stated that there is a
global effort to incorporate pervasive sensors, actuators and data networks into national power
grids.This Smart grid offers deep monitoring and controls,but needs advanced analytics over
millions of data streams for efficient and reliable operational decisions.In this paper the research
have contributed toward cloud based online solution for managing the resources.

Smart grids as being the future of Energy management solutions has being greatly emphasized.
Like in A secure cloud computing based framework for big data information management
of smart grid (Joonsang Baek , Quang Hieu Vu , Joseph K. Liu , Xinyi Huang , Yang Xiang
Khalifa University of Science, Technology and Research, UAE Etisalat BT Innovation Centre
(EBTIC), UAE Institute for Infocomm Research, Singapore Fujian Normal University, China
Deakin University, Australia) stated that —Smart grid is a technological innovation that improves
efficiency, reliability, economics, and sustainability of electricity services. It plays a crucial role in
modern energy infrastructure. The main challenges of smart grids, however, are how to manage
different types of front-end intelligent devices such as power assets and smart meters efficiently.

Furthermore,in The Internet of Energy: Smart Sensor Networks and Big Data Management
for Smart Grid, by (Manar Jaradata , Moath Jarraha,c, Abdelkader Bousselhamb, Yaser
Jararweha,∗ , Mahmoud Al-Ayyouba) stated that The smart sensor networks provide numerous
opportunities for smart grid applications including power monitoring, demand-side energy
management, coordination of distributed storage, and integration of renewable energy
generators. Because of their low cost and ease-of-deployment, smart sensor networks are likely
to be used on a large scale in future of smart power grids. The result is a huge volume of
different variety of data sets.