Service Orientation and the Smart Grid state and trends

The energy market is undergoing major changes, the most notable of which is the transition from a hierarchical closed system toward a more open one highly based on a “smart” information-rich infrastructure. This transition calls for new information and communication technologies infrastructures and standards to support it. In this paper, we review the current state of affairs and the actual technologies with respect to such transition. Additionally, we highlight the contact points between the needs of the future grid and the advantages brought by service-oriented architectures.

Agent-based simulation of electricity markets: a literature review

Liberalisation, climate policy and promotion of renewable energy are challenges to players of the electricity sector in many countries. Policy makers have to consider issues like market power, bounded rationality of players and the appearance of fluctuating energy sources in order to provide adequate legislation. Furthermore the interactions between markets and environmental policy instruments become an issue of increasing importance. A promising approach for the scientific analysis of these developments is the field of agent-based simulation. The goal of this article is to provide an overview of the current work applying this methodology to the analysis of electricity markets. --

Peer-to-peer and community-based markets: A comprehensive review

The advent of more proactive consumers, the so-called "prosumers", with production and storage capabilities, is empowering the consumers and bringing new opportunities and challenges to the operation of power systems in a market environment. Recently, a novel proposal for the design and operation of electricity markets has emerged: these so-called peer-to-peer (P2P) electricity markets conceptually allow the prosumers to directly share their electrical energy and investment. Such P2P markets rely on a consumer-centric and bottom-up perspective by giving the opportunity to consumers to freely choose the way they are to source their electric energy. A community can also be formed by prosumers who want to collaborate, or in terms of operational energy management. This paper contributes with an overview of these new P2P markets that starts with the motivation, challenges, market designs moving to the potential future developments in this field, providing recommendations while considering a test-case

Models for the modern power grid

This article reviews different kinds of models for the electric power grid that can be used to understand the modern power system, the smart grid. From the physical network to abstract energy markets, we identify in the literature different aspects that co-determine the spatio-temporal multilayer dynamics of power system. We start our review by showing how the generation, transmission and distribution characteristics of the traditional power grids are already subject to complex behaviour appearing as a result of the the interplay between dynamics of the nodes and topology, namely synchronisation and cascade effects. When dealing with smart grids, the system complexity increases even more: on top of the physical network of power lines and controllable sources of electricity, the modernisation brings information networks, renewable intermittent generation, market liberalisation, prosumers, among other aspects. In this case, we forecast a dynamical co-evolution of the smart grid and other kind of networked systems that cannot be understood isolated. This review compiles recent results that model electric power grids as complex systems, going beyond pure technological aspects. From this perspective, we then indicate possible ways to incorporate the diverse co-evolving systems into the smart grid model using, for example, network theory and multi-agent simulation.Comment: Submitted to EPJ-ST Power Grids, May 201