Semantic Web Technologies for a Smart Energy Grid: Requirements and Challenges

The Smart Grid aims at making the current energy grid more efficient and eco-friendly. The Smart Grid features an IT-layer, which allows communication between a multitude of stakeholders and will have to be integrated with other "smart" systems (e.g., smart factories or smart cities) to operate effectively. Thus, many participants will be involved and will exchange large volumes of data, leading to a heterogeneous system with ad-hoc data exchange in which centralised coordination and control will be very difficult to achieve. In this paper, we show parallels between requirements for the (Semantic) Web and the Smart Grid. We argue that the communication architecture for the Smart Grid can be built upon existing (Semantic) Web technologies. We point out differences between the existing Web and the Smart Grid, thereby identifying remaining challenges.