A Method to Assess the Economic Feasibility of New Commercial Services in the Smart Grid

As more commercial services are offered and provided on-line, tools to analyse their socio-economic impact are also needed. For instance, new services such as Spotify, Uber and AirBnB have been able to disrupt different sectors because they rely on combining new business models together with information and communication technology (ICT). For (traditional) enterprises, however, launching that kind of services is not always easy since they should consider, among other things, the economic impact of those services. Although tools and techniques based on Enterprise Architecture (EA) help during the design of new services by supporting a holistic process to model business and ICT perspectives, they often lack support to perform economic assessments. This paper presents a method to assess the economic feasibility of new services in the smart grid (SG) that combine business models and ICT. Using multilayer networks and the Smart Grid Architecture Model (SGAM), the method allows to calculate investment decision techniques such as net present value (NPV) and internal rate of return (IRR). Finally, we evaluate our method on two innovative services to locally trade renewable energy.