China Telecom, China Southern Power Grid, State Grid, and Huawei Successfully Initiated the 5G Smart Grid Project in 3GPP
BEIJUNG - At the 3GPP SA#88e plenary meeting held online, China Telecom, together with 27 other members including China Southern Power Grid, State Grid, global carriers, Huawei, and other vendors, submitted the 5G smart grid project. Successfully initiated in 3GPP R18, the project will define the standard E2E architecture of 5G smart grids for the first time, laying a solid foundation for its rapid development, according to the official website of Huawei.
Communication infrastructure is key to the success of smart energy, and 5G, with its high bandwidth, massive connections, low latency, and high reliability, interworks with innovative technologies such as network slicing and edge computing to satisfy the requirements of smart grids. Over the past year, following in-depth research and discussion, 3GPP has continuously advanced the concepts, characteristics, connotations, and denotations of 5G smart grids. By promoting in-depth integration of advanced information technologies, Internet concepts, and energy industries, in addition to boosting the development of new energies, models, and businesses, the evolution of 5G smart grids will help to ensure energy security, cope with climate change, and achieve sustainable development.
The 5G smart grid project is jointly initiated by 28 3GPP members, encompassing global telecom vendors, terminal vendors, chipset vendors, verticals, governments, universities, and professional scientific research institutes, with primary members including China Telecom, China Southern Power Grid, State Grid, Huawei, Fudan University, China Mobile, China Unicom, CATT, Tencent, OPPO, Vivo, Xiaomi, Samsung, Vodafone, Telefonica, Orange, the European Space Agency, THALES, Sony, and Novimant.
Xia Xu, an expert from the China Telecom Research Institute and vice president of 3GPP SA1, was appointed project rapporteur. The project itself focuses on the role of 5G in smart grids, ranging from traditional energy services to remote control, teleprotection, metering, advanced metering infrastructure, distributed automation, and demand response, energy and distribution management.
Leveraging a mature and fully equipped industry chain, and effectively showcasing the development of 5G, the power grid industry delivers widely-used applications, covers a wide range of services, and has a profound impact on other industries. The key to 5G development is openness and cooperation, and we hope that the industry can jointly participate in the formulation and release of unified 5G smart grid standards. Such collaboration will lead to a more secure, reliable, and flexible smart grid industry capable of driving other verticals and giving impetus to the development of 5G.
