Communication architecture for energy balancing market support on smart grid

The recent developments in smart grids towards fine-grained electricity monitoring, active participation of home prosumers on the market with distributed renewable generation, e-car storage etc, and widely deployed active demand response require the setup of new communication infrastructure on all layers. Measuring equipment with significantly higher temporal resolution than existing smart meters is required, better local buffering and management of data, secure, high performance communication with infrastructure in the so called energy cloud, and finally end-user mobile applications for control and monitoring. We present the use cases and requirements foreseen in the eBADGE project and the current implementation of the pilot. The central point is the Home Energy Hub (HEH), comprising a multi-channel measurement board and a RaspberryPi based computer. It communicates over 4G LTE (Long Term Evolution) mobile network or alternatively over DSL (Digital Subscriber Loop). A mesh-like interconnection of multiple HEHs at a single site is also supported, communicating among them over WiFi or ZigBee. Above the network layer, HTTP was found to lack fitness for our purposes, thus a message bus is used. RabbitMQ (AMQP 0.9.1 implementation), is chosen as the most appropriate. The publicly available, open specification of supported message types was developed specifically for energy market use and strives to combine the strengths of multiple existing standards such as OpenADR 2.0.