Standardized Communication of Time-of-Use Prices for Intelligent Energy Management in the Distribution Grid

Time-of-use pricing will play an increasingly important role in the future energy supply system. Using these tariffs energy prices for households can better reflect on real market prices. On the one hand time-of-use tariffs can give an incentive for people to shift their energy usage manually to times of low prices. On the other hand they enable intelligent automatic control of variable loads and producers. Tariff information can be communicated in several different forms. In this paper the main properties of a tariff communication protocol are discussed. Next the four common Smart Grid and Smart Metering application layer protocols ZigBee, M-Bus AL, SML and IEC61850 are discussed regarding their support for tariff communication. In detail the information flow and the supported types of tariffs are being looked at. Finally we compare the protocols and point out in which way the protocols differ.