INTEGRATED POWER QUALITY MONITORING SYSTEM AND THE BENEFITS OF INTEGRATING SMART METERS

Because of the regulatory requirements for the quality of electricity supply being imposed in many countries, power quality is ought to be an important aspect of smart distribution grids. In this context, there is a need for the Integrated Power Quality Monitoring System, which would integrate all the power quality data available from various systems of smart distribution grid, such as Power Quality Monitoring System, Automated Meter Reading/Advanced Metering Infrastructure, Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition, Electric Vehicle Management System etc. In this paper the power quality data management role of Integrated Power Quality Monitoring System is presented. Instead of accumulating all the historical data, the Integrated Power Quality Monitoring System should collect only data from the measurement devices in the affected area, needed for analysing the propagation and the source of the disturbances. The benefits and challenges of using smart meters for power quality monitoring are discussed in this paper in more detail. Also in this paper, the results of laboratory tests of power quality capability of a single smart meter are presented. The comparison of measurement between a power quality instrument and several smart meters for the example of one real medium voltage/low voltage network is presented, with the special focus on the distribution of voltage harmonics.