Innovation Through Topmost Disruptive Trends in Smart Grid Industry and Indian Power Sector’s Stance on These Trends

With rapidly emerging trends in technology, the power sector is already experiencing the shift and growth at every level—from upstream generation to beyond the meter grid, network operations. Recent technology vogues like big data analytics, machine learning, artificial intelligence, blockchain combined with advancements in communication infrastructure like 5G have enabled transformative changes in numerous industries with smart grid being one of them. The sector has already been witnessing a major shift from scale-driven, centralized and standardized model, to a digital, distributed and personalized one. It becomes imperative to embrace innovation at all levels of the grid. This paper discusses the three topmost disruptive trends in power sector that could have a widespread impact on traditional elements of power infrastructure viz. DERs (Distributed Energy Resources), IoT (Internet of Things) and Analytics. It analyzes the current stance of Indian smart grid sector on each of these trends, market positions, challenges and open issues. The paper then also discusses roadmap for the utilities companies and partners to sustain growth among these disruptive trends by focusing on customer engagements, reducing administrative costs by moving towards managed services, improving product quality and more.