5. Smart Energy System

The solar energy systems are developing rapidly, thus necessitating flexibility in the system to make it future-proof and sustainable. This will ensure that intermittent nature of these renewable sources and significant variations in demand and supply can be taken care. The novel technologies with innovative solutions need to be incorporated to transform the electrical networks into smarter grids. The role of information and communication technology (ICT), Internet of Things (IoT), energy storage, intelligent control systems, and smart energy meters will be crucial in the development of smart energy systems. These smart energy systems will play vital role in improving renewables’ performance and exploitation with real-time balancing between supply, demand, and storage. Besides, it will also help in energy efficiency, reducing energy waste, peak curtailment using demand-response management, reduction in system’s overall cost, better network control, enhanced performance and reliability of power system with optimal planning of the transmission and distribution systems, and implementation of microgrids with additional distributed generation (DG), etc. In real world, different energy sources and technologies exist, and together fulfills the global energy demand. A smart energy system, therefore, should consider the integration of different energy infrastructure, which may include the production, conversion, storage, and consumption of different energy sources in an intelligent manner. Transportation and storage are going through a revolutionary transformation phase, where a lot of research has been devoted on different aspects to make them an affordable reality. All these lead to new challenges and opportunities, such as charging infrastructure, power quality, frequency response with reducing system inertia, etc. Our current energy system simply cannot map the demands from homes and businesses accurately, and a data-driven approach with smart energy meters may resolve the problem with the use of digital technology to actively monitor the generation and consumptions patterns at root levels. This chapter aims to introduce the concept of smart energy systems (SES). Accordingly, it presents the basic concept of smart grid, issues in integration of renewable energy sources, features of the smart energy systems from the recent literature and challenges ahead in this domain. Finally, it also discusses some models of SES and their relative comparison.