On experience of smart grid projects in Europe and the Swedish demonstration projects

Report, 2013

Renewable energy sources are expected to play a significant role into the future power system. The variable and at many cases not easily predictable production of electricity will pose a threat on the reliability and efficiency of the current electricity grid. Hence, there is great need of measures that will be able to handle these fluctuations of the production systems. Transforming the current grid to become a more intelligent system that could predict the variations as well as exploit hours with lower demand and, hence, lower electricity prices is one way to deal with the problems caused by the technology shifting. New projects that address those issues are constantly under deployment in recent years. In Sweden today there are three large demonstration projects, the Sustainable City Hyllie, Smart City Gotland and the Stockholm Royal Seaport. This paper investigates the technologies used in the three projects, how the goals that were set in the beginning of each project are being fulfilled, as well as the ways that the different actors are copying with the challenges and problems faced. The approach that was used includes a comparison of the projects with other successful finalized projects carried out throughout Europe. The methodology was divided in three smaller steps. The first step was the collection of data about all the technologies and all the investigated projects in Europe and Sweden. The second step was to construct a table where a significant number of technologies used by the projects were listed alongside with an indication on whether the implementation of the technologies is finished or ongoing. The results for the ongoing Swedish demonstration projects were iterated and checked by conducting interviews with key people inside the projects. Finally, using the data from the table some conclusions and results were extracted in the final part of the report.