Testing and evaluating sophisticated information and communication technologies for enabling scalable smart grid deployment
Smart grids represent an electricity network that can intelligently integrate generators, consumers and energy storage in order to efficiently deliver electricity. There is a clear consensus that smart grids can provide many innovative services – to date the EC has devoted €360,413 million to support 527 projects on developing smart grid services. Decision-making plays a vital role in these services. But the computational complexity of decision-makings could grow explosively with the size of smart grid infrastructure, the number of devices/users, or the amount of data; If this scalability issue was underestimated, smart grid services can end up with poor performance or limited function, making these services impractical to meet the needs of real-life or industrial-scale deployment. Hence, there is an urgent need to solve the research problem: to what extent the performance and function of smart grids can be maintained without having significant increase of the computational complexity when its scale is changed in terms of smart grid infrastructure size or the number of devices/users? TESTBED2 is a major interdisciplinary project that combines wisdoms in three academic disciplines - Electronic & Electrical Engineering, Computing Sciences and Macroeconomics, to address the aforesaid problem. The main focus is on developing new techniques to improve the scalability of smart grid services, particularly considering the joint evolution of decarbonised power, heat and transport systems. Moreover, new experimental testbeds will be created to evaluate scalable smart grid solutions.  Overall, the main objective of this project is to coordinate the action of 12 Universities (6 in EU, 3 in US, and 3 in China) and 5 enterprises (3 SMEs and 2 large enterprises) with complementary expertise to develop and test various promising strategies for ensuring the scalability of smart grid services, thereby facilitating successful deployment and full roll-out of smart grid technologies.