Smart Grid Technologies in Europe: An Overview

The old electricity network infrastructure has proven to be inadequate, with respect to modern challenges such as alternative energy sources, electricity demand and energy saving policies. Moreover, Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) seem to have reached an adequate level of reliability and flexibility in order to support a new concept of electricity network—the smart grid. In this work, we will analyse the state-of-the-art of smart grids, in their technical, management, security, and optimization aspects. We will also provide a brief overview of the regulatory aspects involved in the development of a smart grid, mainly from the viewpoint of the European Unio

Managing Distributed Information: Implications for Energy Infrastructure Co-production

abstract: The Internet and climate change are two forces that are poised to both cause and enable changes in how we provide our energy infrastructure. The Internet has catalyzed enormous changes across many sectors by shifting the feedback and organizational structure of systems towards more decentralized users. Today’s energy systems require colossal shifts toward a more sustainable future. However, energy systems face enormous socio-technical lock-in and, thus far, have been largely unaffected by these destabilizing forces. More distributed information offers not only the ability to craft new markets, but to accelerate learning processes that respond to emerging user or prosumer centered design needs. This may include values and needs such as local reliability, transparency and accountability, integration into the built environment, and reduction of local pollution challenges. The same institutions (rules, norms and strategies) that dominated with the hierarchical infrastructure system of the twentieth century are unlikely to be good fit if a more distributed infrastructure increases in dominance. As information is produced at more distributed points, it is more difficult to coordinate and manage as an interconnected system. This research examines several aspects of these, historically dominant, infrastructure provisioning strategies to understand the implications of managing more distributed information. The first chapter experimentally examines information search and sharing strategies under different information protection rules. The second and third chapters focus on strategies to model and compare distributed energy production effects on shared electricity grid infrastructure. Finally, the fourth chapter dives into the literature of co-production, and explores connections between concepts in co-production and modularity (an engineering approach to information encapsulation) using the distributed energy resource regulations for San Diego, CA. Each of these sections highlights different aspects of how information rules offer a design space to enable a more adaptive, innovative and sustainable energy system that can more easily react to the shocks of the twenty-first century.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Sustainability 201

APPLICATION OF MULTI-AGENT SYSTEMS IN ELECTRICITY MARKET SIMULATORS

Kako procesi liberalizacije i deregulacije tržišta električne energije diljem svijeta uzimaju sve više maha, tako se broj sudionika na tržištu, a ujedno i njihova raznolikost, naglo povećava. U tradicionalnom monopolističkom modelu tržišta svi su procesi, koji se odvijaju u elektroenergetskom sustavu (EES), bili pod nadzorom vertikalno integriranih kompanija. No, kako se tržišna logika mijenja od one usmjerene na što je niže moguće troškove proizvodnje električne energije na težnju k što većem profitu, tako se i rizik raspodjeljuje među svim tržišnim sudionicima podjednako i nije više u potpunosti na leđima krajnjih potrošača. U takvim nesigurnim uvjetima, u kojima se cijena električne energije mijenja iz sata u sat, svaki tržišni sudionik želi se osloniti na pomoć pouzdanog alata koji bi mu pomogao pri donošenju optimalnih i kvalitetnih odluka i strateških nastupa. Gotovo istodobno strelovito napreduje relativno nova znanstvena disciplina – agentsko modeliranje procesa iz stvarnog života. Adaptivnim i inteligentnim agentima, s mogućnošću komunikacije, pokušavaju se predočiti kako pojedinci tako i institucije te njihova djelovanja. Nedvojbeno je da upravo ovakav, agentski pristup može pronaći i već pronalazi svoje mjesto i u simuliranju procesa koji se odvijaju na tržištu električne energije. Što je model kvalitetniji i što je bolje prilagođen stvarnom stanju specifičnog tržišta, to će i rezultati njegovog korisnika biti bolji i njegov profit veći.Since the liberalization and deregulation of the electricity markets throughout the world are in full swing, the number of market participants, as well as their diversity, is sharply increasing. In the traditional monopolistic market model, all the processes that occur in a power system have been supervised by vertically integrated companies. Since market logic is changing from that oriented toward minimizing generation costs for electrical energy to the trend of maximizing profit, the risk is being distributed among all the market participants uniformly and is no longer entirely borne by the final consumers. Under such uncertain conditions, in which the prices of electrical energy change from hour to hour, each market participant wants a reliable tool to facilitate optimal and quality decisions and strategic performance. At practically the same time, a relatively new scientific discipline is making rapid advances agent-based process modeling from real life. Through adaptive and intelligent agents, with the possibility of communication, attempts are being made to depict the activities of individuals and institutions. Just such an agent approach has undoubtedly already found a role in the simulation of processes that occur on the electrical energy market. The better the model and the better its adaptation to the real state of a specific market, the better the results for the user and the greater the profit

A multi-agent approach for planning activities in decentralized electricity markets

Despite the rigour and ability of game theory to cope with oligopolistic electric markets, it fails to model many existing behaviours in the real-world circumstances. The traditional models such as statistical extrapolation or econometrics are not capable to anticipate the changes in the pattern of the market prices due to the future structural changes. Furthermore, in such free and open markets, there is a more intense need for each participant to benefit from a certain level of autonomy, while keeping some capabilities to interact, communicate, collaborate and negotiate with other participants in an efficient way. As a result, there is a need for a novel framework of modelling that could include game theoretical assumptions as well as other more complex assumptions. Agent technologies in general and agent-based simulation in particular offer this possibility. This paper proposes, in a decision-making perspective, a new multi-agent architecture specifically designed to support planning activities in decentralized electricity markets, with a certain level of flexibility. In this model, synthetic agents are created allowing flexible representations of the multi-functional market players and possible mergers and coalitions in the electricity market