Smart Grid – the concept, trends and stakeholders’ analysis

Throughout the last century, global demand for electricity increased, resulting in a growing number of power plants and related infrastructure. Along with this, the demand for modernization and automation of electric networks has risen. Different industrial trends, such as digitalization and integration emerged in various industries, including energy production, result in the creation of the Smart Grid concept. Smart Grid is a term for an intelligent network that extends the distribution and transport system of electricity to optimize ongoing operations and opening new markets for alternative energy. The Smart Grid has different properties, such as increased use of digital and monitoring technologies, demand management, integration of smart metering devices and consumer devices, providing consumers with real time information and management capabilities. Smart Grid is a complex concept, which has to be analyzed for the point of implementation complexity. The key components of this implementation complexity have the technology and the organizational cores. Technological complexity includes component production, technical implementation of networks, reliability and security, and privacy. At the same time, organizational complexity is associated with the interests of a huge number of different stakeholders and their goals. All these points complicate the implementation of technology and the creation of a unified potential implementation framework. This research papers addresses the Smart Grid technology in order to create its comprehensive understanding and develop this implementation framework based on world-wide standard of Enterprise Architecture. Keywords—Smart Grid, electricity, Enterprise Architecture, ADM, implementation framework