ICT for renewable energy integration into smart buildings: IoT and big data approach

SG (Smart Grids) are emerging as a very promising technology with buildings as one of its most critical components. SG are meant to leverage energy-efficiency and promote green usage via efficient renewable energy integration. SG pose inherent challenges stemming, mainly, from its inter-disciplinary nature. Besides ICT (Information and Communication Technology), SG involves two other broad disciplines: 1. Power systems and 2. Control systems. Still, ICT is the major component that manifests SG “ Smartness”. In this work, we present the architecture of a real-world smart micro-grid testbed to be deployed in a university campus. We highlight its main components with an emphasis on the ICT component. We are advocating that SG will utilize Internet of Things (IoT) to source all types of data, and thus making the whole system fall within the realm of Big Data. To handle the huge amount of data that will be collected, we advise the deployment of a private local Cloud using open source platform for HPC (High-Performance-Computing) along with Hadoop/MapReduce as the underlying data storage and processing model. We deem this project as an ideal blueprint that can be easily adopted for similar real-world smart micro-grid testbeds in Africa and around the world.