Impacts of ICT on the pan-European power system up to the 2050 time horizon

This paper describes the impact of ICT on the future development of pan-European power systems up to the 2050 time horizon. More innovative power delivery, supported by state-of-the-art ICT, is essential for the future development of low-carbon and more extensively integrated power systems. The most physically quantifiable ICT components: storage, bandwidth, and computational power are introduced alongside the appropriate qualitative ICT objectives of resilience, maintenance, privacy and cyber security, and interoperability. Relevant ICT infrastructures are classified and these infrastructures are mapped to the power system domains in order to illustrate their interactions and domain relevance. Finally, in order to consider the role of ICT infrastructure in future scenarios, a range of potential benefits that ICT can bring into future power systems are quantified, and the costs of implementing ICT infrastructures and benefits enabled through ICT are compared for a specific scenario.