This Technical Report provides an overview of the technical contents and regulatory arrangements of some 32 of the many Smart Grid projects that are currently in operation, or under construction, within Europe 1). This Technical Report is intended to provide useful information to those organisations and individuals that are currently engaged or about to become engaged in developing Smart Grids. It is also intended that this Technical Report will be used to support the development of relevant standards by presenting the key learning points from early Smart Grid projects – it is widely accepted that the publication of relevant standards will accelerate the development of Smart Grids. It is recognised that this Technical Report only covers a sample of the Smart Grid projects within Europe; it would be impractical to attempt to include every project. It is assessed that the 32 projects shown in this Technical Report are sufficiently representative to provide information and draw early conclusions. Clause 2 of this Technical Report provides a brief overview of all 32 projects, Annex A contains details of the 32 projects as supplied by the countries that participated in the drafting of this Technical Report.
NOTE 1 In order to avoid losing potentially useful information, the details presented in Annex A are very close to the raw data provided by the different countries, with only minor editorial amendments made in the drafting of this Technical Report.
One of the key objectives of this Technical Report is to identify the learning objectives for each of the Smart Grid projects, i.e. why is the project is being carried out and how the success of the project in meeting these objectives will be determined.
NOTE 2 It is intended that the learning contained in this Technical Report, in particular the learning around what type of standards are required to support the development of Smart Grids, will provide useful input to the joint CEN/Cenelec/ETSI Smart Grid Co-ordination Group (SGCG). The SGCG has been established to support the requirements set out in the European Commission Smart Grid Mandate M/490, March 2011.
NOTE 3 In drafting this Technical Report the working group were made aware of a report with a similar scope to this Technical Report that was being produced by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) 2). The JRC report is now published and publically available. It is assessed that this Technical Report and the JRC report are complementary documents; the JRC report provides a high-level view on 220 projects that are being conducted across Europe whereas this Technical Report provides more detailed information on 32 projects.
This Technical Report presents the situation for the 32 projects as they are at the time of writing; as time moves on, it might be necessary to update this Technical Report or to produce a second edition containing information on more recent projects and learning from existing projects, such as those documented in this Technical Report.