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In Australia and many other countries, distribution network service providers (DNSPs) have an obligation to their customers to provide electrical power that is reliable and of high quality. Failure to do so may have significant implications ranging from financial penalties theoretically through to the loss of a license to distribute electricity. In order to ensure the reliability and quality of supply are met, DNSPs engage in monitoring and reporting practice. This paper provides an overview of a large long-running power-quality monitoring project that has involved most of Australia's DNSPs at one time or another. This paper describes the challenges associated with conducting the project as well as some of the important outcomes and lessons learned. A number of novel reporting techniques that have been developed as part of the monitoring project are also presented. A discussion about large-volume data management, and issues related to reporting requirements in future distribution networks is included. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Smart grids should increase efficiency by enhancing coordination at the electricity distribution grid level and facilitating new market competition for services on a level playing field. Information management has become a new task in the electricity supply chain and an essential component of smart grids. Governance of information management should balance the goals of coordination and competition. Based on the analysis in this paper, existing participants in the electricity supply chain and the corresponding governance approaches appear to be unsuited to this goal and new governance approaches and roles are needed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an extension of the Common Information Model (CIM) with a catalog of topologies, in other words with a catalog of bays, for distribution networks. This extension has been realized by defining an additional set of metadata for cataloguing equipment containers. The extended CIM was tested on real distribution networks. Performance metrics of the model, taken into account at the time of evaluation were: the size of the CIM/XML (eXtensible Markup Language) document containing exported data about the network, and the speed of processing the topological connectivity of the network in advanced Distribution Management System (DMS) applications. According to the test results, incorporating the catalog of bays may significantly boost the performance of CIM based solutions without jeopardizing CIM compatibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]