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This paper discusses historical and technical events in the U.S. and Europe over the last few years that are aimed at modernizing the electric power grid. The U.S. federal government has ratified the "smart grid initiative" as the official policy for modernizing the electricity grid including unprecedented provisions for timely information and control options to consumers and deployment of "smart" technologies. European countries are unified in researching and developing related technologies through various structures supported by the European Union. This paper presents the development of smart grids and an analysis of the methodologies, milestones, and expected evolutions of grid technologies that will transform society in the near future.

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Grid modernization through philosophies such as the Smart Grid has the potential to meet increasing demand and integrate new distributed generation resources at the same time. Using advanced communication and computing capabilities, the Smart Grid offers a new avenue of controlling end-user assets, including small units such as home appliances. To enable such evolution, shifting from centralized to decentralized control strategies is required. Effective demand-side management (DSM) and demand response (DR) approaches hold the promise for efficient energy management in homes and neighborhood areas, by enabling the precise control of resources to reduce net demand. However, with such strategies, independently taken decisions can cause undesired effects such as rebound peaks, contingencies, and instabilities in the network. Therefore, the interactions between the energy management actions of multiple households is a challenging issue in the Smart Grid. This paper provides a review of the background of residential load modeling with DR and DSM approaches in a single household and concepts of coordinating mechanisms in a neighborhood area. The objective of this paper is to classify, via comparison, the various coordination structures and techniques from recent research. The results of recent research in the field reveal that the coordination of energy management in multiple households can benefit both the utility (i.e., the service provider) and the customer. The paper concludes with a discussion on the prevalent critical issues in this area.

Global Real-Time Super Laboratory (Global RT-Super Lab) represents a vendor-neutral distributed platform established based on virtual interconnection of Digital Real-Time Simulators (DRTS) and Hardware-In-the-Loop (HIL) setups hosted at eight geographically distributed laboratories located in the USA and Europe. This article describes the efforts towards the realization of this large-scale virtual infrastructure and demonstration of the multi-lab setup for simulation and testing of next generation global power grids.

Smart homes hold the potential for increasing energy efficiency, decreasing costs of energy use, decreasing the carbon footprint by including renewable resources, and transforming the role of the occupant. At the crux of the smart home is an efficient electric energy management system that is enabled by emerging technologies in the electricity grid and consumer electronics. This article presents a discussion of the state-of-theart in electricity management in smart homes, the various enabling technologies that will accelerate this concept, and topics around consumer behavior with respect to energy usage.