Latest trends in integrating building automation and smart grids

Previously mostly independently considered topics grow more and more together to form the building blocks of the future smart city. The building itself needs to be built as a zero average energy consuming building, posing requirements mainly on thermal and electrical parameters. Those parameters need to be known and controlled, requiring intelligent control techniques and cross-layer optimized sensor networks. Finally, very differently used buildings together participate in the infrastructure of the city, which gives them freedom to passively burden the grids, or actively help stabilizing them, while benefitting from different tariffs in the smart grids. This paper summarizes the state of the art of those topics with respect to industrial electronics.