Smart Microgrids: Overview and Outlook

Our paper “Smart Microgrids: Overview and Outlook” by Anita Sobe and Wilfried Elmenreich has been accepted for the Smart Grid Workshop of the ITG INFORMATIK 2012 conference, taking place from 16th to 21st September 2012 in Braunschweig, Germany.

The idea of changing our energy system from a hierarchical design into a set of nearly independent microgrids becomes feasible with the availability of small renewable energy generators. The smart microgrid concept comes with several challenges in research and engineering targeting load balancing, pricing, consumer integration and home automation. In this paper we first provide an overview on these challenges and present approaches that target the problems identified. While there exist promising algorithms for the particular field, we see a missing integration which specifically targets smart microgrids. Therefore, we propose an architecture that integrates the presented approaches and defines interfaces between the identified components such as generators, storage, smart and “dumb” devices.

Anita Sobe, Wilfried Elmenreich, “Smart Microgrids: Overview and Outlook”, ITG INFORMATIK 2012, Workshop on Smart Grids, September, 2012 [PDF]