SUNSEED — An evolutionary path to smart grid comms over converged telco and energy provider networks

SUNSEED, “Sustainable and robust networking for smart electricity distribution”, is a 3-year project started in 2014 and partially funded under call FP7-ICT-2013-11. The project objective is to research, design and implement methods for exploitation of existing communication infrastructure of energy distribution service operators (DSO) and telecom operators (telco) for the future smart grid operations and services. To achieve this objective, SUNSEED proposes an evolutionary approach to converge existing DSO and telco networks, consisting of six steps: overlap, interconnect, interoperate, manage, plan and open. Each step involves identification of the related smart grid service requirements and implementation of the appropriate solutions. The promise of SUNSEED approach lies in potentially much lower investments and total cost of ownership of future smart energy grids within dense distributed energy generation and prosumer environments.