Smart Microgrids: Overview and Outlook

TL;DR

This paper provides an overview of smart microgrids, discusses key challenges and approaches, and proposes an integrated architecture to enhance their functionality and management.

Contribution

It offers a comprehensive overview of smart microgrid challenges and introduces an integrated architecture to unify various approaches in the field.

Findings

Identification of key challenges in smart microgrid development

Review of existing algorithms and approaches

Proposal of an integrated architecture for smart microgrids

Abstract

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 \dq{dumb} devices.