Smart Grid Technologies in Europe: An Overview

The old electricity network infrastructure has proven to be inadequate, with respect to modern challenges such as alternative energy sources, electricity demand and energy saving policies. Moreover, Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) seem to have reached an adequate level of reliability and flexibility in order to support a new concept of electricity network—the smart grid. In this work, we will analyse the state-of-the-art of smart grids, in their technical, management, security, and optimization aspects. We will also provide a brief overview of the regulatory aspects involved in the development of a smart grid, mainly from the viewpoint of the European Unio

Management and Control of Domestic Smart Grid Technology

Emerging new technologies like distributed generation, distributed storage, and demand-side load management will change the way we consume and produce energy. These techniques enable the possibility to reduce the greenhouse effect and improve grid stability by optimizing energy streams. By smartly applying future energy production, consumption, and storage techniques, a more energy-efficient electricity supply chain can be achieved. In this paper a three-step control methodology is proposed to manage the cooperation between these technologies, focused on domestic energy streams. In this approach, (global) objectives like peak shaving or forming a virtual power plant can be achieved without harming the comfort of residents. As shown in this work, using good predictions, in advance planning and real-time control of domestic appliances, a better matching of demand and supply can be achieved.\ud \u

A three-dimensional model of residential energy consumer archetypes for local energy policy design in the UK

This paper reviews major studies in three traditional lines of research in residential energy consumption in the UK, i.e. economic/infrastructure, behaviour, and load profiling. Based on the review the paper proposes a three-dimensional model for archetyping residential energy consumers in the UK by considering property energy efficiency levels, the greenness of household behaviour of using energy, and the duration of property daytime occupancy. With the proposed model, eight archetypes of residential energy consumers in the UK have been identified. They are: pioneer greens, follower greens, concerned greens, home stayers, unconscientious wasters, regular wasters, daytime wasters, and disengaged wasters. Using a case study, these archetypes of residential energy consumers demonstrate the robustness of the 3-D model in aiding local energy policy/intervention design in the UK

Enabling Machine Understandable Exchange of Energy Consumption Information in Intelligent Domotic Environments

In the 21st century, all the major countries around the world are coming together to reduce the impact of energy generation and consumption on the global environment. Energy conservation and its efficient usage has become a top agenda on the desks of many governments. In the last decade, the drive to make homes automated and to deliver a better assisted living picked pace and the research into home automation systems accelerated, usually based on a centralized residential gateway. However most devised solutions fail to provide users with information about power consumption of different house appliances. The ability to collect power consumption information can lead us to have a more energy efficient society. The goal addressed in this paper is to enable residential gateways to provide the energy consumption information, in a machine understandable format, to support third party applications and services. To reach this goal, we propose a Semantic Energy Information Publishing Framework. The proposed framework publishes, for different appliances in the house, their power consumption information and other properties, in a machine understandable format. Appliance properties are exposed according to the existing semantic modeling supported by residential gateways, while instantaneous power consumption is modeled through a new modular Energy Profile ontolog

GREEND: An Energy Consumption Dataset of Households in Italy and Austria

Home energy management systems can be used to monitor and optimize consumption and local production from renewable energy. To assess solutions before their deployment, researchers and designers of those systems demand for energy consumption datasets. In this paper, we present the GREEND dataset, containing detailed power usage information obtained through a measurement campaign in households in Austria and Italy. We provide a description of consumption scenarios and discuss design choices for the sensing infrastructure. Finally, we benchmark the dataset with state-of-the-art techniques in load disaggregation, occupancy detection and appliance usage mining

Smart Procurement of Naturally Generated Energy (SPONGE) for Plug-in Hybrid Electric Buses

We discuss a recently introduced ECO-driving concept known as SPONGE in the context of Plug-in Hybrid Electric Buses (PHEB)'s.Examples are given to illustrate the benefits of this approach to ECO-driving. Finally, distributed algorithms to realise SPONGE are discussed, paying attention to the privacy implications of the underlying optimisation problems.Comment: This paper is recently submitted to the IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineerin