Towards designing and developing curriculum for the challenges of the smart grid education

At the tipping of a paradigm shift in the way energy is produced, transmitted and delivered, the research efforts have not been paralleled by the curricular development. With rapid pace of changes in the field of Smart Grid (SG), the traditional research and educational efforts have been a major domain for electrical engineers. As a mode of discovery and education, interdisciplinarity facilitates broadened perspectives, ability to synthesize, analyze, integrate, and apply knowledge, and out-of-the-box thinking. The major contributions of this paper are discussion of requirements of the educational efforts in SG with special emphasis on multidisciplinarity, survey of the related work, which is the first in the literature to the best of our knowledge, and a discussion of the content for such an effort. A mixed team of power engineers and computer scientists are developing a layered curriculum starting from the introductory material from a variety of SG topics. A distinguishing advantage is the availability of many software tools and the state-of-the-art testbed as a result of years of research.