The old electricity network infrastructure has proven to be inadequate, with respect to modern challenges such as alternative energy sources, electricity demand and energy saving policies. Moreover, Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) seem to have reached an adequate level of reliability and flexibility in order to support a new concept of electricity network — the smart grid. In this work, we will analyse the state-of-the-art of smart grids, in their technical, management, security, and optimization aspects. We will also provide a brief overview of the regulatory aspects involved in the development of a smart grid, mainly from the viewpoint of the European Union.

The energy efficiency of IT has become one of the hottest topics in the last few years. The problem has been typically addressed by hardware manufacturers and designers, but recently the attention of industry and academia has shifted to the role of software for IT sustainability. Writing energy-efficient software is one of the most challenging issues in this area, because it requires not only a change of mindset for software developers and designers but also models and tools to measure and reduce the effect of software on the energy consumption of the underlying hardware. In this article, the authors present a conceptual framework that provides a unifying view of the strategies, models, and tools available so far for designing and developing greener software.

In the quest for energy efficiency of Information and Communication Technology, so far research has mostly focused on the role of hardware. However, as hardware technology becomes more sophisticated, the role of software becomes crucial. Recently, the impact of software on energy consumption has been acknowledged as significant by researchers in software engineering. In spite of that, measuring the energy consumption of software has proven to be a challenge, due to the large number of variables that need to be controlled to obtain reliable measurements. Due to cost and time constraints, many software product organizations are unable to effectively measure the energy consumption of software. This prevents them to be in control over the energy efficiency of their products. In this paper, we propose a software energy profiling method to reliably compare the energy consumed by a software product across different releases, from the perspective of a software organization. Our method allows to attribute differences in energy consumption to changes in the software. We validate our profiling method through an empirical experiment on two consecutive releases of a commercial software product. We demonstrate how the method can be applied by organizations and provide an analysis of the software related changes in energy consumption. Our results show that, despite a lack of precise measurements, energy consumption differences between releases of a software product can be quantified down to the level of individual processes. Additionally, the results provide insights on how specific software changes might affect energy consumption

Software energy efficiency is a research topic where experimentation is widely adopted. Nevertheless, current studies and research approaches struggle to find generalizable findings that can be used to build a consistent knowledge base for energy-efficient software. To this end, we will discuss how to combine the traditional hypothesis-driven (top-down) approach with a bottom-up discovery approach. In this technical briefing, participants will learn the challenges that characterize the research in software energy efficiency. They will experience the complexity in this field and its implications for experimentation.