Bornholm will be Europe's first Smart island

摘要

In September the EcoGrid project to create a Smart Grid template for the EU and the world officially got underway with a ceremony in Copenhagen. EcoGrid EU is a 21-million-euro development and demonstration project with EU funding totalling 12.5 million euros for the setting up of a future-proof smart grid on the Danish island of Bornholm in the Baltic Sea. It is being carried out by an international and multidisciplinary consortium of 16 participants based in 10 European countries (Table 1), it was initiated by Danish TSO Energinet.dk, and is being co-ordinated by SINTEF Energi AS, the Norwegian contract energy research organisation. The results of the project, which will run until 2015, will constitute the basis for roll-out of future smart grid projects Europe-wide. Within this framework, the EcoGrid project will demonstrate how a smart grid works when the connected households and industrial loads can adapt their power consumption to the amount of power available, in particular where the renewable energy sources (usually from wind) represent a very high proportion of the total. To this end, the home automation devices, the communication infrastructure and the smart grid applications (such as the Siemens load management solution) are to be installed by 2012 to meet the scheduled operational date for this smart grid prototype.