Role of IoT for Energy Monitoring and Energy Management System in Smart Renewable Energy Community: Concept, Need and Proposed Architecture

The Renewable energy community has emerged in European countries due to many benefits like social, economic, and environmental. Renewable energy communities contain energy technologies like renewable energy sources, energy storage systems and electric vehicles. It is well known that the utilization of these energy technologies can help to achieve the energy transition, however managing the renewable energy community needs an innovative design and technologies as it undergoes significant and drastic structure. Moreover, there is the main issue of monitoring and energy management system in these communities to check the energy flow and exchanges and associated benefits. In this instance, a fundamental and important requirement for renewable energy communities’ operation is the integration of the current electrical infrastructure enabling information communication and technologies. Information communication and technologies include many diverse areas, but our research work is on the Internet of Things for the energy sector particularly for the renewable energy communities. Internet of Things is a vast and an emerging area, which has become dominant in many areas due to many advantages. Enabling technologies like Internet of Things in renewable energy communities facilitate to check and monitor the data through the Internet of Things enabled components which are necessary to guarantee the operational viability of these renewable energy communities for the energy management and the monitoring system. This would help to analyze the data and associated incentives like for energy self-consumption and energy sharing with RESs and other energy technologies and a consumption profile could be changed after monitoring the data for profit. This article also focusses on the background study relevant to renewable energy communities and Internet of Things, discuss the components for Internet of Things and propose its architecture for the renewable energy communities. This architecture would help the researcher, participants and stakeholders to check, monitor and control the energy flows and the benefits.