The potential of Industry 4.0 toward smart grids: opportunities and challenges

The technology progresses based on the ‘Industry 4.0’ paradigm, the cornerstone role of the electrical energy grid to feed industries and the need of increasing the share of the renewable energy sources in the global energy mix to address the climate change, are some of the key factors asking for efficient, reliable and smart energy systems. Smart grid projects are emerging across the European continent as a promising approach for relieving the energy crisis, increasing the adoption of the renewables, and building high-resilient grids. Decentralized systems, compared to the traditional energy grids fuelled by large scale fossil-fuel power plants, join greater flexibility to high efficiency. In addition, they increase the overall system reliability, limiting supply interruptions and facility inefficiencies. In this context, the ‘Industry 4.0’ technologies, such as the Internet of Things (IoT), blockchain, Big Data analytics, can help and enable the real-time system running. However, integrating and coordinating a complex and bidirectional network of nodes is more challenging than a conventional centralized grid system. At the same time, ‘Industry 4.0’ provides several solutions in this field. The aim of this paper is to analyse the potential of smart grids, ‘Industry 4.0’ enabling technologies, and current applications focusing on the architecture of smart grid energy systems. Opportunities and challenges of the smart grids are presented and exemplified through an energy and information flows management framework ‘Industry 4.0’-based.