ICT Reference Architecture Design Based on Requirements for Future Energy Marketplaces

Today's Smart Grid initiatives propose highly decentralized power supplies with an increased number of providers utilizing renewable energy resources. This idea is driven by the imminent requirement for improved sustainability of power industries and also by the legislative demand for more competitive energy market structures. Due to these intentions the number of regional market participants will be increasing dramatically over the next few years. In order to coordinate and balance energy supply and demand under these new circumstances, major ICT related challenges need to be addressed. This paper introduces a reference architecture design offering a set of extensibility points to existing solutions for increased flexibility in moving energy markets. The architecture design is based on the idea for open energy marketplaces in regional power distribution networks enabling load management and transfer. By defining flexible high level interfaces, it respects potentially upcoming requirements, new evolving services, and - resulting from these services - integration and mediation of future market roles. Furthermore the architecture presented in this paper also considers various regulative requirements resulting in different operational modes for provisioning of clearing, monitoring and controlling data.