Introduction

Looking beyond 2030, the challenges of efficient distribution and management for electricity networks are likely to get tougher. There exists a general consensus that the challenges of climate change, system security, and a need to accommodate significant volumes of decentralized and renewable generation, require the network infrastructure to enable smarter grid operation. The major changes to the way we supply energy and monitor its consumption by building a smarter grid lie at the heart of these changes.

Governments around the world are propitiating serious efforts towards becoming decarbonised economies as a part of a National climate change mitigation strategy. The transition to a decarbonised economy involves three main aspects: (i) developing energy efficiency, (ii) developing renewable energy capabilities and (iii) dealing with adaptation needs arising due to climate change.

The large increases in electricity generation from intermittent/highly variable renewable resource, the increase of stressing/narrowly conditions on transmission system, a massive decoupling between generation/load and several other features expected into the future electricity networks will negatively affect the system security.

To overcome these issues and the renewable sources into the distribution network, making it an active distribution network, the concept of microgrid presents itself to be a viable solution. It can have several other advantages which include reduction in transmission losses, improvement in power quality & reliability, reduction in emissions and even provide provisions for heterogeneous power quality. Even though the concept seems promising, much of research is needed to bring about its actual implementation. The reliable and sophisticated solutions to the foreseen issues of the future networks are creating dynamically-intelligent application/solutions to be deployed during the incremental process of building the smarter micro-grids.

The future electricity networks and its potential issues require looking beyond the existing research frontiers irrespective of the disciplinary boundaries. For this reason, the discussion of the future development on smarter architecture and its intelligent applications/solutions is the key research point to provide the critical importance to economic and social welfare into future smarter micro grids networks. The solutions using the advanced technologies/methodologies will be discussed. Several technical studies based on the recent research work will also be presented by Indian and UK researchers.