An IoT approach for Smart Energy districts

In the last few years, the strong decentralization of energy production, fostered by the adoption of small renewable energy plants directly connected to the grid, has been placing the end user at the center of the electrical system management. Indeed, the end user has become at the same time producer and consumer of electricity. In addition, groups of end users are encouraged to form the so-called energy districts in which the energy is exchanged locally or negotiated, without intermediaries, directly with the energy provider. This paper proposes Power Cloud, an Internet of Things solution for energy districts. Power Cloud injects smartness into the management of an energy district by supplying a distributed computing layer that controls the physical devices of the end users, and interacts with a centralized cloud component that manages the whole district. In particular, each end user dwelling is equipped with a Smart Energy Aware Gateway (SEAG), which monitors and controls a nanogrid and a home automation system. The SEAG computes the optimal energy strategy for the local dwelling, starting from information achieved by means of complex prediction algorithms that are purposely executed on the cloud.