Hoogkerk, a suburb or Groningen in the Netherlands, officially began operating a microgrid and calling itself "the power-matching city" on March 10, 2010. The Hoogkerk microgrid includes 25 interconnected houses and is part of the SmartHouse/SmartGrid project and another research project carried out by ECN and further partners. The houses are outfitted as follows:

• Twelve have a combined heat and power (CHP) plants with high efficient 1 kW boilers running on natural gas
• The other 13 have a hybrid heat pump that combines an air-to-water heat pump with condensing boilers
• All 25 houses have smart meters from Itron
• Each house has twelve square meters of PV paneling for a total capacity of 1,400 W peak
• Ten houses have a smart washing machine and dishwasher from Miele
• One house has a plug-in hybrid Toyota Prius car and two others each have an all-electric Volkswagen Golf car
• One house has a standard lead-acid battery to store solar energy for later use

Together, these houses form a virtual power plant. Added community-based power will be produced by a 2 MW wind farm. The community will also have a 30 kW gas micro-turbine manufactured by Capstone.

At the heart of this trial is the PowerMatcher software that is developed by ECN in the framework of the SmartHouse/SmartGrid and other research projects. As the microgrid's main intelligence, PowerMatcher will assign a software agent to every component on the system. The agents will then negotiate for the cheapest power, sell generated power at the best price and try to get the maximum benefit from each source of power consumption.

The field trial B involves in-house and back-office information and communication technology (ICT). The hardware used has specifically been designed for the trial and is already available. The software mainly relies on the OGEMA framework with according services and applications.

The installation of the smart meters has been done during spring 2010. The installation of first system prototypes at the end customers' premises has first started at "very friendly user's" homes. Afterwards, all BEMIs will be rolled out during October and November, so that the field trial operations can start.

The customers will be able to specify their preference for device operation (e.g. for the fridge, washing machine, dish-washer or other household appliances) in a dedicated customer portal. Users can also track their energy consumption through MVV's smart metering portal.

The installation in field trial C will include ten cottages in the Meltemi Camp. Meltemi comprises 220 cottages which are fully inhabited in the summer (from May to September) and mostly empty in winter. A typical cottage in the camp is a single floor building of 70 m2 surface as it can be seen in the Figure below. Most of the cottages are more than 30 years old.

The whole camp is supplied by a 3-phase medium-to-low voltage substation. The maximum load consumption of the site is approximately 220 kW. Furthermore a 40kW diesel generator is present. Finally, PV systems are installed in some of the houses as well in the entrance of the camping. The total installed capacity is 6kWp.