This helps communicate with the utilities to balance the power generation and optimize the energy consumption. There are a significant number of energy-consuming devices that have the capability of connecting to the internet. The goal is to improve the efficiency of production and distribution of electricity.

A smart grid can also be defined as a utility-side IoT application that encompasses systems that gather, act on energy and power-related information. Industrial management systems can be integrated with smart grids to enable energy optimization. Many aspects of our world are or can be powered and controlled by the smart grid.

Therefore, to protect, control and optimize the energy consumption to meet all the customer needs, there is a need for innovative technology that upgrades the traditional power system. There is an option of catering to the peak demand in one area by transporting power from a lower demand area to a high demand area, but it is a potentially dangerous way of handling the situation and leads to transmission loss due to resistance in the wires. This is crucial because otherwise, there might be power failure events, and the system will be unable to respond to the additional demand reliably. Also, typically the grid must have some excess generating capacity above the anticipated peak to cater to any increased demand. That translates to the fact that the traditional grid must generate at peak load capacity consistently even though peak load may be necessary only for a few hours in a day. Thus, whatever amount of power is required at a given instance, it must be generated and transported right away to the end-users. In a typical electric grid, electricity cannot be stored. Image used courtesy of Department of Information and Communication Technology, University of Applied Science and Technology, Tehran, Creative Commons In layman’s terms, IoT technology can be considered to be synonymous with products that pertain to “smart” devices, be it a smart home with appliances such as home security systems, controlled lighting fixtures, automated thermostats, and others that are closely associated with such an ecosystem like smartphones, smart speakers and so on.įigure 1. Internet of Things (IoT) with its connections and related entities.

Traditional technologies like embedded systems, controls and automation, wireless sensor networks, and others contribute towards enabling the IoT. In recent years, several technologies have converged, leading to tremendous evolution in capability. The IoT can also be defined as a connection of people and things at any time in any place with anything and anyone using any path and any service. Read on to learn more about integrating IoT with the smart grid and the IoT architectures in the smart grid. This leads to the reasonable definition of IoT as things having identities and virtual personalities operating in smart spaces using intelligent interfaces to connect and communicate with social, environmental, and user contexts. Semantically, it means a worldwide network of interconnected objects that are uniquely addressable based on the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and Internet Protocol (IP). In simple terms, The Internet of Things (IoT) is a huge network of connected things.

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