The days of power being generated in centralized locations is coming to an end. The U.S. is coming off a record year in wind power. The UK has an aggressive plan for investing in renewable energy systems and Barack Obama is investing hundreds of billions of dollars to see solar power and wind energy maintain their momentum. It’s safe to say that a wide dispersion of power generation will continue with the proliferation of all these renewable energy forms.

This is creating some problems when it comes to managing power grids since the infrastructure was designed to pipe power from one spot outwards like a spider web.

But wind power and solar energy producing electricity across entire countries grid operators are having problems knowing what generators are connected, whether they are working or not and how much electricity they are generating. This hasn’t been too big a problem so far but with these industries growing like wild fire it likely will be in the near future.

As we reported earlier on our wind power sister site, Southwest Windpower has been lobbying the U.S. government to expand Wi-Fi Internet connections in rural areas so as to allow its wind turbines to communicate with a central operator.

Now FGH research in Germany has taken a look at this same problem and made a significant breakthrough in dealing with this issue.

“Grid management systems were designed around a large number of clients and a few suppliers, but now there are increasing numbers of suppliers. This requires a new level of communication and management system,” explains Bernhard Schowe-von der Brelie, a lead researcher at the FGH research institute.

Schowe-von der Brelie has made great  progress towards developing a solution, for managing distributed resources in an electricity grid while also providing a method of communication between autonomous systems across any network.

The German research has team developed a generic framework that will allow for ‘self-describing’ networks. These networks allow each component, whether it’s a simple wind turbine volt meter or a weather station’s thermometer, to autonomously send its information regarding its function, location and any relevant data.
The results of this “self describing” network is that smart power grids can be set up for a town or city more easily and cost-effectively.

Schowe-von der Brelie explains, “Instead of storing information in a centralized database, the S-TEN approach is for each node, each sensor or device connected to the network, to have its own intelligence.”