Smart Grids Deployments within EU Projects: The Role of Smart Meters

There is a large number of European Union (EU) projects that deal with Smart Grids research and deployment. Overall, they provide a substantial amount of knowledge that can be mined to gain useful insights for future projects and on-going roll-outs of Smart Grid related utilities. In the current paper, we focus on Smart Meters and we evaluate different communication-related architectural styles within an Advanced Metering infrastructure (AMI). In particular, we derive from the Joint Research Centre (JRC) Smart Grids projects review three different layouts for Smart Meters two-way communication: i) mobile Peer-to-Peer (P2P), ii) data concentrator-supported, and iii) gateway-supported. After the discussion about the architectural styles, we look at how common such choices are within EU projects deployments. Overall, we found predominance of both gateway / data concentrator architectures over P2P mobile communication layouts. The main outcome of the paper is a mapping of the three architectural styles to the deployments within the selected EU projects. Based on the map, we debate about the implications of such deployments within the current and future Smart Grids context.