In 2011, the European Commision's Joint Reserach Centre (JRC) initiated a comprehensive inventory of smart grid projects in Europe to collect lessons learned and assess smart grid projects in the 27 Member States of the European Union, Croatia, Switzerland and Norway. The catalogue as published in July 2011 included 219 smart grid and smart metering projects representing an overall investment of over € 5 billion.
Due to the positive response to the catalogue it was decided to continue the effort on an annual basis. An upate of the inventory was released in 2012 with a further update in 2013. Based on this updated inventory a dedicated benchmarking report is expected to be issued by the European Commission sometime this year. In the future the SG project database will be used to perform detailed
cost-benefit analyses of different smart grid applications.
The updated database is the most current and comprehensive inventory of smart grid and smart metering projects in Europe for 2012. It includes 281 smart grid projects and around 90 smart metering pilots and roll-outs.
Criteria for including smart grid projects
A smart grid is an electricity network that can efficiently integrate the behaviour and actions of all users connected to it — generators, consumers and generator/consumers — in order to ensure an economically efficient, sustainable power system with low losses and a high quality and security of supply and safety.
Four screening rules were used to define which projects were to be included in the smart grid catalogue:
- Projects involving new energy technologies and resources where integration into the grid was also part of the project were included.
- Projects aimed at making the grid smarter through new technologies were included.
- Projects aimed at making the grid stronger using conventional design approaches were excluded.
- Projects lacking sufficient information to allow a reliable project assessment were excluded.
Challenges
Information about the majority of projects was shared on a voluntary basis, in other words it was not legally mandated to be open. The reluctance to share negative results may represent a systematic bias in the SG database. In addition there is a lack of a common framework for data sharing and analysis. In this context the JRC's broader objective was to establish an open platform for the collection and dissemination of SG project information involving all Member States, international organisations and energy operators.
The JRC smart grid project database, which functions as the single repository of European smart grid projects, will be regularly updated. All financial and economic information will be treated confidentially and only aggregated data will be published. The database is linked to a map which showas geographically the projects across Europe. Project data can be tracked on the JRC smart grid website and on the smart-grid project portal developed by the JRC and the European electricity industry association (EURELECTRIC).
Overview of SG projects inventory
281 smart grid projects across 30 countries, EU-27, Croatia, Switzerland and Norway, with a total investment of € 1.8 billion;
The number of smart grid projects has increased dramatically from 2006 onward;
During the period 2008-12, investments in smart grid projects were consistently above € 200 million per year, with the highest investement € 500 million in 2011;
The size of projects has been growing steadily. The investment share of projects with budgets of over € 20 million grew from 27 % in 2006 to 61 % in 2012.
The UK, Germany, France and Italy are the leading investors in smart grid projects. Denmark is the most active country from an R&D perspective with many small projects. Denmark is also the country that spends the most on smart grid projects per capita and per KWh consumed.
The catalogue contains about 60 multinational projects, mostly in the EU15 countries (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom). Spain, France and Germany are the most active in setting up cooperation links in multinational projects;
The organizations that are involved in these projects are electricity distribution companies, followed by university/research centres, manufacturers and IT/Telecom companies. Aggregators/retailers/service providers participate in a limited number of projects. Transmission operators lead about 10 % of the projects surveyed
Funding plays a crucial role in stimulating private investment in smart-grid R&D and demonstration projects. 87% of the projects received some form of funding. 55 % of the total budget for the smart grid projects surveyed comes from various public sources of funding (national, EC, regulatory) and the remaining 45 % from private capital. A significant contribution comes from the OFGEM 'Low Carbon Network Fund' initiative in the UK.
Smart grid applications
Control and automation systems to improve the monitoring and control of distributed energy resources (DER);
Distributed ICT architectures for coordinating distributed resources enabling monitoring and control of demand and supply
Distributed intelligence/multi-agent architectures are being widely adopted with successful trials of virtual power plants (VPPs), but lack of standardised control and communication solutions means that costly ad-hoc configuration is required, which limits the participation of smaller utilities
A few large scale demonstrators have been launched to test VPP coordination with market signals and grid constraints. Scalability is a major focus, especially when thousands of agents need to be coordinated.
Electric vehicles (EV) with a focus on ensuring that the charging and communication infrastructure works before venturing into more sophisticated applications like vehicle-to-grid (V2G) services.
Projects involving storage are on the rise. Use of storage as additional source of grid flexibility is one of the key themes of the main projects that started in 2012.
Smart meter projects
Smart metering investment already undertaken amount to over € 4 billion, with the main investments in Italy (€ 2.1 billion) and Sweden (€ 1.5 billion). It is estimated that at least € 30 billion will be spent and at least 170-180 million smart meters will be installed in EU-27 by 2020. France will install 35 million meters by 2017, the UK will install 56 million by 2019, and Spain will install 28. Cost varies from less than € 100 to € 400 per meter.
The most common key monetary benefits of smart metering are energy savings, reduced meter readings and operational savings for the utility, for exampe, reducing technical and non-technical losses.
The most widespread communication option is the combined use of power line communication (PLC) for the smart meter-Cconcentrator connection and GSM/GPRS for the concentrator-data management system connection.
The role of consumers
An increasing numbers of projects are focusing on consumer engagement. Consumer resistance to participating in projects is still significant. Consumers participating in trials are typically volunteers and are not representative of consumers in general. Denmark and Germany are the leading countries with projects focusing on consumer engagement. The main factors used for motivating consumers are reduction of bill cost, environmental concerns and better comfort.
Obstacles
Obstacles to participation in smart grid projects include
- Lack of interoperability and standards raises costs and limits the ability of smaller utilities to participate in SG activities
- Uncertainty over roles and responsibilities of the regulators in new smart grid applications; uncertainty over sharing of costs and benefits and consequently over new business models;
- Consumer resistance
- Differing national regulatory policies beyween Member States
Data collection and dissemination
It is crucial that project information is shared, but there are many barriers to this: web information about projects is difficult to retrieve; many projects do not have a dedicated website; in some cases, websites are only in the national language;
Making European funding subject to the extensive sharing of project results greatly contributes to knowledge-sharing in the smart grid community. Typically, EU-financed projects provide the most detailed and accessible information;
The open dissemination platform launched by the JRC has proved to be a very valuable instrument. The setting-up of visualisation platforms to track project data and results is key to encouraging (voluntary) information-sharing. The JRC database is now recognised as the main repository of smart grid projects in Europe. Over 400 responses to the JRC project questionnaire were returned by project coordinators in 2011-12.
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