Is Electric Power Industry Ready for 5G?

5G is positioned as the key technologies to support Energy Internet as a reliable and secure communication infrastructure that provides ubiquitous connectivity for Energy Internet. This presentation summarized various existing and future communication services for domains such as generation, transmission, distribution, and power consumption. It also discussed the network architecture design for various applications to provide connectivity or serve as the redundant communication channel to provide improve the communication system reliability and resiliency for the power grid. It also touched on architectural considerations of slicing at 5G core, transport, and radio access network (RAN), the architectures of 5G user plane and control plane, etc., and summarizes considerations and key indexes in building and adopting 5G for the electric power grid, including 5G network deployment strategy, deployment methods, and communication slice verification, and operation and management functions. Lastly, the the presentation provides a review of existing and ongoing 5G supported smart grid applications, proof of concept projects globally and shares the first line differential protection in distribution and PMU applications over 5G communication networks.