The Joint Research Centre of the European Commission published the second release of the inventory of Smart Grid Laboratories worldwide. R&D NESTER was been identified as a new European laboratory, relevant in the field of Smart Grids. The report containing aggregated technical information about the smart grid activities carried out by smart grid laboratories in Europe and has been published in the end of 2016.

Includes technical data about 69 smart grid laboratories. The majority of the participant laboratories are located in Europe (85.5%), covering a large number of countries. The major part of labs is in Italy and Spain (16%) with Portugal to follow (10% - 7 Laboratories).

Some general conclusions achieved were:

• The main customers of the smart grid labs are utilities, the academia and industrial companies.
• The initial budget for setting up the lab is, on average, around 2 M€, but for large institutions it reaches up to 30 M€. On average, the estimated total annual running cost amounts to a median value of 135 k€.   
• IEC 61850 is the mostly used standard (in 7 out of the 13 categories) for: Distribution Automation, Grid Management, Storage, Generation & DER, Electromobility (for communication purposes), ICT and AMI activities. For the other categories, more specific standards are adopted.
• Survey sample has shown that among the 13 categories identified, those that attract mostly the scientific interest are: Generation & DER, Demand Response, Grid Management and Storage. This comes in accordance with the conclusions drawn from the extended sample of 100 laboratories, where the top categories are proved to be again Generation & DER, Grid Management and Storage.
• A minimum of 40% of the total number of laboratories (100) use a real-time simulator.
• At least 47% of the laboratories perform research on microgrids.   

For additional information, please visit Joint Research Centre publications webpage.

To download the report containing aggregated information about the smart grid activities here