Integrated communications with sensing and measurements are relevant technologies identified to provide automation for the smart grid (SG) applications. Incorporating intelligence into the electrical grid necessitates the gathering of relevant information in in real-time from variety of electrical utility sources located either at the bulk generation, transmission, distribution or customer domain. The deployment of wireless sensor network (WSN) is an attractive solution for such task, due to certain merits. In this paper, we show how large WSN cluster could benefit from distributed max-dmin MIMO precoder with a proposed node selection technique offering a realistic implementation. We exploit spatial diversity of the nodes to make the channel state information (CSI) available at transmitting nodes organized into a cluster. Performance evaluation of the nodes selection technique shows substantial amount of energy can be saved in high voltage (HV) power substation channel environment that is corrupted by Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN), impulsive noise, and node synchronization errors. Index Terms—Closed-loop MIMO, cooperation, energy consumption, high voltage substation.