CSG Speeds Up Research & Practice on “Smart Grid Plus 5G”

 Guangzhou - Power communication networks are an important infrastructure for the development of the “smart” grid.

With the rapidly expanding services in large-scale new energy access and the demand-side response of power loads, the need for communication from various power terminals and electricity customers has skyrocketed.

Against this background, massive infrastructure equipment needs real-time monitoring and management under the frequent bidirectional interaction of information. It is urgent to build an economical, flexible, two-way, real-time, safe and reliable wireless access network for terminal communication.

China Southern Power Grid (CSG) has been working on a series of research and practice on the integration application of 5G and the smart grid.

For example, CSG senior managers are drafting relevant work plans, have submitted proposals for electricity requirements to the International Telecommunication Union and carried out relevant tests in cooperation with some companies.

If we 4G is referred as an “ordinary train”, then 5G will put the power grid on a “Revival Express” in the telecommunication industry.

Millisecond-level Latency

Power companies always strive to reduce the power outage time for their customers. After years of construction, fiber optic resources have achieved full coverage of power stations, owned property offices and business premises with 35kV and above.

However, the insufficient communication in power networks have become one of the bottlenecks in the development of smart grid. At present, CSG has a large number of 3G and 4G cards and even 2G cards for regional use. The data transmission latency is relatively long, generally between 50 and 100 milliseconds, which directly affects the significant indicator of power outage time.

5G will feature low latency and high network speeds which should be expected to solve many such technical challenges since its data transmission latency is within 10 milliseconds. Power supply bureau staff from Shenzhen, Zhongshan and other cities in Guangdong Province are immersed in studying 5G applications in distributed automation systems with distribution networks for a quick realization of fault identification and accurate location of line sections or equipment within distribution networks. Such a measure can help reduce power outage time and improve power supply reliability.

CSG senior managers have already formulated and implemented the development plan of the Company’s smart grid. With the development of smart grid construction, the demands for large bandwidth, low latency and the large connection are becoming ever more urgent from the production end to the consumption end.

Likewise these same senior technicians are also probing deeper into research on the “5G+ smart grid” and therefore, it is inevitable to take active measures to seek for cooperation with companies at home and throughout the international community.

Subsequently, CSG senior managers plan to submit more power demand proposals in terms of network architecture, deterministic delay guarantee, safe, reliable access … all in an effort to lay a firm foundation for the large-scale, future application of 5G in the power grid field.

This is expected to further promote technical research, product development, test verification and standard setting.

“Slicing” Provides BRT Information Transmission Channel for Power

Although 5G transmission latency is shorter and the speed of 5G is faster, it will still cast an shadow on time consumption if the amount of information transmitted is too large. How can CSG avoid information “congestion”?

Slicing technology may be the solution to this problem.

Taking blocked traffic as an example, the lanes in a city can be specially set aside for buses and high occupancy vehicles. Likewise, a dedicated power BRT channel can be designated exclusively to create a ‘wireless private network’ for power information transmission for the power grid industry.

Different from ordinary users, slicing is a necessity for power grid companies.

There is a massive data transmission within the power grid for 24 hours a day, which has extremely high requirements on the reliability, safety, and service quality guarantee capability of the channel.

Last month, CSG, together with China Mobile Communications Group Co. Ltd., and Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd., completed the industry’s first 5G end-to-end slicing outfield functional test of wireless, transmission and core networks based on SA architecture in Bantian, Shenzhen.

Through the field deployment of the network to carry three slices of power grid services of different partitions, it is preliminarily verified that the slices are not affected by each other, and hence can fulfill the goal of hard isolation and guaranteed service quality.

CSG senior managers will lead the charge in carrying out tests in different business scenarios in many places to comprehensively sort out and analyze the communication requirements under various scenarios, verifying the feasibility, safety, and efficiency of 5G carrying differentiated services.

As the power grid is related to the safety of electricity consumption of millions of households throughout South China, the power grid control business is expected to be able to recover quickly if problems arise.

In this case, the 5G operation management mode still needs to be explored if power grid companies are to realize full-scale management and control of power grid information.

There is, undoubtedly, a great deal of challenges standing in the way of developing a 5G smart grid, but the application of 5G and smart grid is arguably one of the most important technological opportunities of our modern age times … thus the integration of the two is inevitable.