Deploying Smart Micro Grids for Researchers: a Practical Approach

Smart Grids (SG) are emerging as a very promising technology to cope with the increasing stochastic demand on energy, the rapid introduction of distributed renewables, and the expected large-scale adoption of electrical vehicles (EVs). Micro Grids (MG) constitute the building blocks of SG. Spanning small geographic areas, MGs are leveraging modularity and thus reducing the complexity of SG. The main challenge in SG is the real-time tracking and dissemination of electricity consumption/production data. This data falls within the realm of Big Data and needs to be processed in real-time in order to generate appropriate control actions and to monitor the stochastic Demand Response (DR) variance. To do so, we need to call upon a mixture of ICTs (Information and Communication Technologies), e.g., Networking, HPC, Big Data processing and analytics, Machine Learning, Control theory, Context-Awareness, etc. In this paper, and based on a real-world testbed deployment, we present the practical rudiments of deploying a real-world MG in a university campus. We mainly address ICT related aspects. As a first milestone, we integrated Renewable energy into a Smart Building and set the appropriate ICTs towards a full MG implementation.