International Energy Agency (IEA) Implementing Agreement for a Co-operative Programme on Smart Grids

ISGAN is the short name for the International Energy Agency (IEA) Implementing Agreement for a Co-operative Programme on Smart Grids (ISGAN). ISGAN creates a mechanism for multilateral government-to-government collaboration to advance the development and deployment of smarter electric grid technologies, practices, and systems. It aims to improve the understanding of smart grid technologies, practices, and systems and to promote adoption of related enabling government policies. ISGAN was launched as the International Smart Grid Action Network at the first Clean Energy Ministerial (CEM), a meeting of energy and environment ministers and stakeholders from 23 countries and the European Union held in Washington, D.C on July 19 and 20, 2010.
The work in ISGAN is organized in Annexes. This project is concerning the Danish participation in Annex 5 called Smart Grid International Research Facility Network (SIRFN).
The work in SIRFN concentrates on exchange of experiences with research facilities for testing of smart grid technologies at the component and system level. An important part of the activities is on developing and investigating testing methods with the objective of having a common understanding of the issues involved in testing smart grid technologies since such tests involve power, communication and control subsystems that interact both at the component and system level. Several of the issues are common among the participants while other issues are specific to the various countries. However, it is relevant to investigate if common supersets of functionality can be derived to allow for large scale deployment at low cost.
ISGAN is the only world spanning network and SIRFN has participation of the leading test facilities in Europe, North America, Korea and Japan. The Danish participation will contribute to ensuring that Danish interests are being included in the international development of testing procedures and it will bring experiences and results obtained from international projects to the Danish power sector and research community.