Summary
Modern society all over the world depends on information and communication technology (ICT); and security of supply with ICT is an important location factor. In times of increasing anonymity, which makes us more and more dependent on public services such as emergency supports (emergency organizations), communication is existential. Communication also plays an important role for a good functioning of economy and industry, in the course of shorter production and storage times. The usage of ICT is taken for granted. However, the modern society's use of ICT is profoundly dependent on the public power supply. Particularly in highly industrialized countries like e.g. Austria, the ICT sector requires about 10% of the total electric energy demand. One third of these 10% is estimated to be used for telephony and transmission. (Frauenhofer-IZM & ISI, 2009). Although there have not been any significant and large scale supply interruptions (blackouts) in Austria in recent years, grid safety experts cannot exclude a pan-European blackout in future. Such an incident would have serious effects on the function of ICT, and thus, on the commercial, industrial and personal life, and is therefore a threat to our civilization. The outage of ICT as a critical infrastructure consequently constitutes a danger to the public. The electrical power demand of ICT now takes very high values and will keep rising. For this reason, a sustainable and reliable power supply concept is of paramount importance. Here, batteries still play an important role, for example in the form of an uninterrupted power supply (UPS). However, these are usually not very efficient and by increasing capacity maintenance-intensive and costly. The implementation of the smart grid technology in the public power grid opens up alternative and high-performance possibilities that can be integrated relatively easily into existing grid structures, exemplarily the combination of the functionality of smart meters and distributed generation units is called smart grids. These generation units might be non-volatile renewable energy sources such as combined heat and power (CHP) and small hydro power plants, however, for reasons of practicability there could also be used conventional gensets.