Panel: Smart homes and smart grid infrastructure

The second panel sessions featured the afternoon’s speakers, who considered questions from the audience.

In answer to a question about affordability, Dr Schlesinger said smart home technology would become more affordable as a response to energy consumption. Developing countries would see consumption rise, but perhaps grids there connected to solar panels might remain smaller, he said. Highly integrated grids are a result of the scaling effects of conventional power generation. Alok Gupta, who holds two professor’s titles in information management and decision science at the University of Minnesota, argued that smart technologies could be used to provide access to energy, and energy in developing countries will be around small, integrated, self-sustaining communities.

Regarding the possibility of regional energy markets, or electricity prices calculated every second, Professor Oren said the last 50 years have been spent trying to interconnect the market to use resources more efficiently; creating little pockets would be less efficient. Dr Kreusel pointed out that large markets arose to avoid wasting energy generated by large power plants. Wind is a traditional technology in that respect, but photovoltaic power is combined with storage. ‘If we have storage and demand-response, the grid may solve its own problems and economics may change the game’, he said.

Dr Schlesinger said he did not believe there would be a single home automation technology in 10 years’ time, but there would be fewer standards and less complexity.

According to Dr Kreusel, prosumers solving the problems of intermittent wind and solar power would be inefficient without sufficient storage, and would be better delegated to a system level. In Germany, the guaranteed take-off of energy from small actors is creating structural problems; in Denmark, everyone is subject to the same rules when supplying power to the grid, and service providers are helping small actors in virtual plants.

Can a market pay customers to not consume energy in order to balance the system? Yes, said Prof. Oren, if you know exactly how much it costs and provide the right incentives. But virtual – and reliable – power plants would be a good solution. Dr Kreusel argued in favour of a horizontal communication structure parallel to the traditional hierarchical system and open to the market. Professor Oren pointed out that although we target energy conservation, the value proposition is to harness the flexibility of flexible load, which is essentially a back-up.

An autocratic approach to industrial and domestic energy demand is definitely not needed, said Dr Schlesinger, but an automated and convenient one with reliable prices is. Prof. Gupta said the reality will be somewhere between devices that ‘know your preferences and maximise your experience’, without risk of violation. Dr Kreusel suggested a framework that will make people ask for smart meters. The innovation process should provide business models, said Prof. Oren; you must accommodate operators and customers.

IT structures will cope with security and management of the data load in a smart grid, according to

Dr Schlesinger. Data volume is not an issue but security is a question that supersedes the smart grid and data privacy cannot be guaranteed. Professor Gupta agreed that data will not create much load, and said there are efforts ‘behind the scenes’ working on the security issue.

Service providers will want a share of the role taken by telecom operators in the IT infrastructure, Dr Schlesinger said, for revenue and for the benefit of capacities such as data centres. Still, telecom operators should decide what they want to offer according to domain-specific limitations. According to Professor Gupta, telecom companies are good at understanding customer preferences.

According to Dr Schlesinger, the real challenge is not making traditional devices smart enough to control remotely, but developing protocols. ‘Smart washing machines are already connectable’ he said.