Areva T&D offers solutions to bring electricity from the source to end-users, building high- and medium-voltage substations and develops technologies to manage power grids and energy markets worldwide. It is a full-fl edged solution provider, offering safe, reliable, efficient power distribution down to the lowest level end-user consumption. Its software applications cover all the strategic operational business processes of an energy utility, including optimization of transmission and distribution grid operation; management of wholesale and retail market operations; and energy transaction solutions involving strategic business processes from energy trading, energy scheduling and dispatch management to demand-side management and settlements.

As long as advanced monitoring and control infrastructures have been used for grid management, Areva T&D has been at the forefront of innovation. Its strategy has always been to supply the most accurate real-time vision of the network infrastructure. This has led to several major breakthroughs, including Areva's latest e-terraVision™ product.

The e-terraVision technology provides control rooms with higher level decision support capabilities through visualization tools, "smart applications" and simulation - thus improving situation awareness. This operator-friendly system enables power dispatchers to fully visualize their networks with the right level of situation awareness and proactively operate the grid by taking the necessary real-time corrective actions.

Expertise acquired in the high-voltage network enables Areva to supply distribution monitoring and control applications as well, and these have greatly influenced its distribution management strategy. As a result of early successes, the company developed an adapted eterra product offer for distribution customers.

Areva T&D continues to integrate unique new concepts to meet market trends and innovation. For example, Areva T&D SmartGrid solutions are designed to supply the following benefits.

1. Alignment with deregulation trends in the consumer electricity market, including:
   • Making the process of changing energy supplier easier;
   • Providing better service quality for energy usage, including accurate and appropriate billing of actual consumed energy;
   • For specific countries where nontechnical losses are significant, allowing accurate audits to be conducted; and
   • Allowing for differentiated energy offerings with greater pricing flexibility and integration of renewable energy offers.
2. Support for further structural benefits discussed and validated as part of international working groups on SmartGrid initiatives:
   • Better selectivity of the IEDs in medium- and low-voltage leads to reduce the number of customers affected by outages, thus improving service quality and reducing maintenance costs.
   • Careful monitoring of low-voltage grids, including consumption by phase and distribution cell - which is especially relevant in terms of renewable energy generation.
   • Online asset monitoring, which enables predictive maintenance, thus increasing assets' life span.
   • Dynamic security management of primary and secondary networks. Introducing renewable energy sources into the distribution network poses a challenge. Combined infrastructures for monitoring systems for distribution and metering will be needed in the near future.

All these challenges have driven the definition and development of Areva SmartGrid solutions. The company's enhanced supervision and control center products, including smart metering, supply all the advantages of automation technologies to distribution networks.