An Overview of Digital Twins Application in Smart Energy Grids

The Digital Twins (DTs) offer promising solutions for smart grid challenges related to the optimal operation, management, and control of energy assets, for safe and reliable distribution of energy. These challenges are more pressing nowadays than ever due to the large-scale adoption of distributed renewable resources at the edge of the grid. DTs are leveraging on technologies such as Internet of Things (IoT), big data analytics, machine learning, and cloud computing, to analyze data from different energy sensors, view and verify the status of physical energy assets and extract useful information to predict and optimize the asset’s performance. In this paper, we will provide an overview of the DTs application domains in the smart grid while analyzing existing the state-of-the-art literature. We have focused on the following application domains: energy asset modeling, fault and security diagnosis, operational optimization, and business models. Most of the relevant literature approaches found are published in the last 3 years showing that the domain of DTs application in smart grid is hot and gradually developing. Anyway, there is no unified view on the DTs implementation and integration with energy management processes, thus, much work still needs to be done to understand and automatize the smart grid management.