The countries of the European Community strongly support the growth of renewable energy sources for better environmental protection, for sustainable energy supply through saving fossil primary energy and to lower the dependency on imports of primary energy. In the next years more and more Gigawatts (GW) of wind and solar energy will be fed into the electricity networks. Today’s networks are not dimensioned for this. Furthermore, a large number of small power producers in the household and the charging of millions of electro-mobiles pose new challenges for the electricity networks.

All these challenges can only be met by Smart Grids. The problem is that each consumer can demand electricity whenever it is desired. In this way a permanent change of demand happens with a peak in Germany of about 80 GW in day time and a weak load of about 30 GW in the night. At each moment, electricity should be produced in accordance with the demand. But wind and solar power plants feed in accordingly their availability. They cannot be controlled like a traditional power station.

To solve these problems a Smart Grid is defined as follows:

 A SmartGrid is an electricity network that can intelligently integrate the actions of all users connected to it - generators, consumers and those that do both - in order to efficiently deliver sustainable, economic and secure electricity supplies

Smart Grids are needed to meet the challenges of the future. However, they offer benefits for all grid users like consumers, producers, network operators and traders as well.

Click here to see how the Smart Grid works.

Source: www.web2energy.com

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