Like many electricity systems around the world, the Irish grid faces some challenges. How can Ireland and Northern Ireland optimize the generation of renewable energy at the point of consumption, while maintaining safe, secure, reliable energy at affordable prices? How can they balance decentralization of generation with increased electric consumption for transportation and heating? What communications standards should be used in this situation? And what socio-economic policies encourage this transition?

These questions and more will be answered with funding from the National Science Foundation, Science Foundation Ireland and Northern Ireland’s Department for the Economy. The project is known as CREDENCE (Collaborative REsearch of Decentralisation, ElectrificatioN, Communications and Economics) and is a partnership between the FREEDM Systems Center, the Research Centre for Marine and Renwable Energy in Ireland (MaREI), and Energy Power & Intelligent Control Research Cluster (EPIC) at Queen’s University Belfast (QUB). The Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) in Ireland is also contributing.

MaREI will lead the energy systems modelling efforts, ESRI will provide insight into socio-economic aspects, FREEDM will bring expertise on distributed energy management solutions and systems-level theory, modeling and control, and EPIC-QUB will lead the communication-centered activities.