Although Smart Energy may sound bizarre to some people but a lot of researchers are trying to make Energy smarter by all means. This includes smarter Supply, Transmission, Sub-Stations, Distribution and last but not least Smart Consumption. And in case you are still wondering which part of this network is UnWired, I will soon let you know.
As a Techno-Economic team, we realized that there is a gap in the aforementioned movement towards Smart Energy. This gap includes a better common communication platform for all components of the Smart Energy network, starting from control units of the Power Plants up to end user devices. This Communication platform then can be the existing Mobile Networks, more or less having their footprints everywhere. But an important issue is whether the existing cellular Radio Access Technologies (RAT) support this model or not; most importantly the Long Term Evolution (LTE) RAT! The big question is whether LTE (as the forefront of Cellular RATs) is a proper technology in this regards or modifications are needed to make it suitable. In order to answer many such questions, a proposal was submitted to EIT ICT Labs including three partners: KTH, Siemens and Ericsson; called LTE for Smart Energy (LTE4SE)
On January 27~28th I and Jan Markendahl attended the kick-off for the project in Munich hosted by Siemens. A nice warm welcome from our German friends was a big boost to start the workshop. Administrative issues, brainstorming (old fashion style shown in the picture) and of course technical issues have been discussed and tasks where distributed among parties quite efficiently, not to forget to mention that the project consists of 3 major tasks:
- Use Cases and Requirements
- Technical Concept and Proof of Concept
- Business Aspects
The Old-Fashion Brainstorming Method
