State-of-the-art integration of decentralized energy management systems into the German smart meter gateway infrastructure

The German Smart Meter Gateway (SMGW) infrastructure enables digital access to metering data and distributed energy resources by external parties. There are, however, various restrictions in order to guarantee the privacy of consumers, and strong security requirements. Furthermore, in the current state of development, there are still several challenges to overcome in order to implement demand side management (DSM) measures. In this paper, we present a prototype enabling DSM measures within the SMGW infrastructure, using the smart grid traffic light concept. The prototype implements an automated decentralized energy management system (EMS) that optimally controls an electric vehicle charging station. In the development of this prototype, we did not only evaluate five of the seven available SMGW devices, but also push the limits of the infrastructure itself. The experiments demonstrated the successful implementation of the intended DSM measure by the EMS. Even though there are technical guidelines standardizing the functionality of SMGWs, our evaluation shows that there are substantial differences between the individual SMGW devices.