A Proposed IoT Architecture for Effective Energy Management in Smart Microgrids

The current electricity grid suffers from numerous challenges due to the lack of an effective energy management strategy that is able to match the generated power to the load demand. This problem becomes more pronounced with microgrids, where the variability of the load is obvious and the generation is mostly coming from renewables, as it depends on the usage of distributed energy sources. Building a smart microgrid would be much more economically feasible than converting the large electricity grid into a smart grid, as it would require huge investments in replacing legacy equipment with smart equipment. In this paper, application of Internet of Things (IoT) technology in different parts of the microgrid is carried out to achieve an effective IoT architecture in addition to proposing the Internet-of-Asset (IoA) concept that will be able to convert any legacy asset into a smart IoT-ready one. This will allow the effective connection of all assets to a cloud-based IoT. The role of which is to perform computations and big data analysis on the collected data from across the smart microgrid to send effective energy management and control commands to different controllers. Then the IoT cloud will send control actions to solve microgrid's technical issues such as solving energy mismatch problem by setting prediction models, increasing power quality by the effective commitment of DERs and eliminating load shedding by turning off only unnecessary loads so consumers won't suffer from power outages. The benefits of using IoT on various parts within the microgrid are also addressed.