Comprehensive validation of an ICT platform to support energy efficiency in future smart grid scenarios

The steady increase of electricity consumption in the EU household sector during the last decades, has made energy efficiency within this scope to become a major issue both for European Commission and for utilities. As a result, several EU R&D projects are currently underway, dealing with different pieces of such challenging problem. Standing out among them is the EU FP7 project ENERsip, whose main objective is to design, develop, and validate an adaptive service-oriented ICT platform to enable energy efficiency within energy-positive neighborhoods by remotely monitoring, controlling, and coordinating power generation and consumption in response to dynamic conditions. This paper focuses on the methodology, procedures, metrics, and tools to comprehensively evaluate the main benefits, in terms of energy and cost savings, as well as the communications infrastructure performance of such platform.