Power supply – “smart grid” as an important piece of the puzzle against blackouts – News

The Federal Council launched a campaign to save energy. We must be economical with electricity. The term “smart grid” is often used in the discussion about impending power shortages. The future power grid should play an important role in preventing blackouts.

“Smart Grid”: It is the digitization of all power grids down to the socket, intelligently converting analog networks into digital networks.

Example: Today, the electricity supplier can only regulate the electricity grid to a limited extent, for example controlling a boiler in a house with a “day/night switch” so that the device can only draw electricity at night. Or it can prevent the washing machine from running from 11:00 AM to 1:00 PM, because this, along with the increased energy consumption of the cook stoves during this period, may cause a stability problem in the network due to not having enough electricity .

Idea: Instead of expanding the grids locally due to increased demand, one tries to make up for the electricity shortage through intelligence in the “smart grid”. Then, these networks provide not only electricity, but also detailed information and data, thanks to which producers and suppliers of electricity can find out where, when and which devices consume electricity. This allows them to turn off individual consumers in a more targeted manner – or turn them on deliberately in order to maintain the stability of the power grid and avoid blackouts.

First of all, all homes and buildings need the so-called “smart meter”, which is an electricity meter that not only measures electricity consumption, but also transmits the consumption to the electricity provider every quarter of an hour. The strategy From the Federal Office of Energy states that 80 percent of old electricity meters will be replaced by the end of 2027.

Smart electricity meters are the first step towards more information about what is happening in the distribution networks. At the same time, a lot of research and development, software and algorithms that automatically control and standards are needed so that all smart grids understand each other. This is a complex task: there is Switzerland around us 600 distribution network operator.

So this “federal factor” slows down the introduction, but Switzerland does not do too badly in the European comparison: only Italy has actually introduced “smart meters” across the board.