A Comprehensive Review on Smart Grid Ecosystem

A smart grid is an intervention technology for the massive energy demand of the world today. It combines cyber-physical technologies, information communication technology, and electrical power networks from the generating company stations to the end-users while ensuring bidirectional communication among the actors. The smart grid is a complex growing technology that is yet to reach its maturity state. This paper seeks to examine the literature on the state of the art of smart grid technology both from the industry perspective and from academia. To this end, a literature review with a qualitative deductive approach built on the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) guideline and the simplified International Telecommunication Union Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T) five-domain model were used as a guide to this research. Furthermore, the paper reviewed Smart Grid data centre topologies and identified prospects in spine-leaf architecture as a promising architecture that can be adapted in a smart grid ecosystem data centre design. The literature was searched from the databases: IEEE Xplore Digital Library, Springer Link Digital Library, and Google Scholar, IET Digital Library, Frontiers Library, ACM Digital Library repositories resulting in 151 papers after several exclusions. The work reviewed relevant literatures published from 2002 to 2021 and grouped the reviewed papers according to the key domains of the NIST/ITU-T model. Based on the evaluated literature, the need for more built-in predictive learning curves in smart grid systems and robust Smart grid architecture with enhanced data centre design for Smart grid systems is observed and recommended