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, requires that the network infrastructure must be upgraded to enable smarter operation. The major changes to the way we supply energy and monitor its consumption by building a smarter grid lies 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 caused by dc system and several other features expected into the future electricity networks will negatively affect the system security.

There are several initiatives around the world to develop very low energy buildings. According to an EU directive, buildings constructed after 2020 will have to be nearly energy-neutral. A Nearly Zero-Energy Buildings (nZEB) is a building that has a very high energy performance. The nearly zero or very low amount of energy required should be covered to a very significant extent by energy from renewable sources, including energy from renewable sources produced on-site or nearby.

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.