Smart Grids with IOT for Integrating Renewable Energy: Its Social, Organizational, and Economic Regulatory Challenges: A Systematic Review

The trends in the world have contributed to the rapid change of energy systems to low-carbon energy systems, which also has promoted the use of smart grids with Internet of Things (IoT) to optimise the use and connection of renewable energy sources. Smart grids can be IoT enabled that can provide real time monitoring, advanced control, predictive analytics and decentralized energy control to cope with the intermittency that is particular to renewable energy that incorporates both solar and wind energy. Its scalability, though, is limited by a multiplicity of non-technical factors that determine the effectiveness and likelihood of the success of such IoT smart grids. The research analyses the case studies of the region Asia Pacific, Europe, North America and some portions of Africa by focusing on how the IoT technologies like smart meters, sensors and communication protocols are being infused into the traditional grid systems. Moreover, the social, economic and regulatory issues of the deployment of smart grid to the integration of renewable energy: literature review. Consumer take-up factors, the aspect of data privacy, the level of digital literacy and acceptance of automated energy systems remains a significant problem. Nonetheless, the organizational barriers which include workforce readiness, legacy and modern infrastructure interoperability, and organizational unwillingness to adopt technology were also present. The bottleneck to commercialization especially in the developing countries is economic barriers that are dominated by high initial cost of investment, uncertain investment returns, financial constraint and uneven sharing of cost-benefits between the stakeholders. The difficulties in the regulations are unequal policies, the lack of a shared framework, legislations to eliminate cyber security and non-coincident energy markets and smart grids. This review shows interdependence of these problems and need to be coherent in policy making, stakeholder participation and development and adaptive regulations by combining recent publications. It is concluded that addressing these multidimensional issues will play a central role in achieving the potential of the IoT-based smart grids to achieve resilient, inclusive and sustainable renewable energy transitions.