Initial survey of Smart Grid activities in the Norwegian energy sector - use cases, industrial challenges and implications for research

Understanding user requirements and technological challenges for Smart Grid is important to deliver competitive and visionary products and services, and thus to shape the direction of research and development. Since Smart Grid is still in the formation stage with many stakeholders, we should quickly develop consensual and pragmatic international standards and strategies. Our goal is to assess the feasibility of proposed Smart Grid requirements, formulated as 16 generic use-cases by an EU working group, and to identify attitudes, products, services and future technologies. Subsequently, we want to provide information on identified gaps between technologies, functionalities and stakeholders views, and future direction. We have designed and carried out an initial industrial survey in Norway on how generic use-cases for Smart Grid activities are interpreted by 6 representative stakeholders in the Norwegian energy sector. To achieve this goal, we designed a survey with metrics built on and around these use-cases. Our results showed that the users´ work experience and views on the functionality expressed in the use-cases revealed a gap in focus and culture. Also, there was no agreement on what the term “Smart Grid” stood for. In addition, the relevance of Smart Grid functionalities is shown to vary over time and with different stakeholders. The pre-study results indicated that there is potential for using information from future data collected from over 270 actors to bridge gaps and focus on Smart Grid research and development.