Transition Process for Smart Grid Compatibility in Residential Buildings

Urbanization itself accounts for a vast amount of energy and cities are centres of resource consumption and buildings can account for 40-60% of the urban energy usage which mostly relies on high Green-House-Gas (GHG) emitting fossil fuels. Climate change and other environmental concerns drive the policy initiatives to be renewable energy oriented. Increasing the share of renewable sources in the energy mix may damage the infrastructure due to the nature of current energy grid. Significant increase in the energy demand and the case of renewable energy penetration to the grid makes it inevitable to improve the transmission grid. Smart grid technology emerged as a result of these requirements. Smart grids provide higher quality of power that will enable saving money wasted from outages, they are more efficient and they have higher capacity for penetration of intermittent power generation sources. UK policy points that a transition to smart grids is in the agenda and will be implemented initially until 2020 and developed further until 2050. This paper justifies the requirement for a transition strategy in terms of retrofitting and design solutions at building level and neighbourhood scale in order to be fully compatible with Smart Grids. It is discussed in the paper that Smart Grid implementations and appropriate energy retrofitting in residential buildings would be the major drivers of achieving the UK Zero-Carbon Homes target and other national and EU wide environmental sustainability schemes. This paper indicates the visionary stage of a wider PhD research which adopts case study research methodology.