A Smart Energy Meter for Power Grids

The growing demand of energy and the need of finding alternative energy sources to the traditional ones, due to the progressive decrease of fossil fuels and an increasing concern towards the environment, have led to a revolution in terms of energy production in the last decade. As a consequence, the distributed generation is more and more widely spreading. The network, in this new dimension, has to change its management and the energy distribution so to achieve and maintain high efficiency requirements. Coming to drop the concept of centralized production, it is immediate to conclude that an efficient distribution of energy must necessarily bring into account the energy footprint of the area, because the energy transport should be always as short as possible, to minimize losses and maximize the efficiency of the network. This concept is the core of the smart-grid idea, on which the global scientific community is investing heavily in research, the idea is a power distribution grid, based on the experience in the information and communications technology field, which can route the energy through appropriate algorithms that are able to determine the optimal path. Of course, behind all this there must be a network structure capable of acquiring detailed data from widespread production and consumption of energy and make them easily available along with additional information, e.g. the Power Quality of the energy exchanged. This information is demanded by simple user, who wants to personally evaluate the functioning of the system, and also by technical personnel, who needs to access to reliable data to perform targeted and efficient interventions. In the present paper, the authors propose a smart energy meter for energy management in power grids. The measurement system has been projected and developed according to the IEEE 1451 (ISO/IEC/IEEE 21451) guidelines. The system is based on a mobile application in order to improve the data exchange and availability.