A ZigBee communication technology is established recently for several smart electric grid applications like Home Energy Management Systems (HEMS), Electric Vehicles (EVs), wireless automatic Metering, load control, fault detection and power outages. Analysis is done to investigate the performance of ZigBee in terms of throughput, packet delivery ratio, average delay and energy consumed in various three dimensional smart electric grid environments which includes an outdoor 500KV substation, an underground network transformer vaults and an indoor power control room. We are considering three dimensional sensor node deployments as more practical in the real world. From our simulation results it is seen that IEEE 802.15.4 based ZigBee is best suited for smart electric grid applications which are having less reliability requirements.