City to Grid (C2G): A Multidisciplinary Opportunity to Engineers Working on Industrial Electronics

City to Grid (C2G): A Multidisciplinary Opportunity to Engineers Working on Industrial Electronics

A new journal comes to life. The Journal of Industrial Electronics and Applications is open to a wide variety of topics and research lines. This editorial is meant to outline a possible multidisciplinary trajectory which provides different research opportunities to engineers working on Industrial Electronics topics. Cities are seen today, from the electric energy point of view, as a set of individual power loads with an unpredictable global behavior (lighting, HVAC, domestic loads and more), but because of several emerging technologies (EV, renewable energies, IoT), the increasing environmental sensitivity and the proposal of new services to citizens, this view of the city is changing drastically. The coordination of power loads to operate as a large single load, the unstoppable introduction of renewable energies in urban environments and the need for energy storage motivated by the rise of EVs are possible due to the growth of IoT. This allows cleverly coordination of every element in the city and therefore its transformation into a great power load, a great energy farm or a large energy storage system (IoE). The coordination of many small elements permits the operation as large modules. Just to mention a few of the technologies involved we can find: lighting engineering, energy storage, EV charging stations, renewable energy generators, wireless communications, control strategies for DC energy distribution, active urban furniture, grid interconnection strategies and many more. The generic denomination of C2G has been used to encompass all these different technologies. Diverse concepts and new ideas about C2G serve as the guiding thread to propose a work trajectory to this new journal. Like the Spanish poet, Antonio Machado, said: "Traveler, there is no path. Paths are made by walking".