Location Awareness in Multi-Agent Control of Distributed Energy Resources

The integration of Distributed Energy Resource (DER) technologies such as heat pumps, electric vehicles and small-scale generation into the electricity grid at the household level is limited by technical constraints. This work argues that location is an important aspect for the control and integration of DER and that network topology can inferred without the use of a centralised network model. It addresses DER integration challenges by presenting a novel approach that uses a decentralised multi-agent system where equipment controllers learn and use their location within the low-voltage section of the power system. Models of electrical networks exhibiting technical constraints were developed. Through theoretical analysis and real network data collection, various sources of location data were identified and new geographical and electrical techniques were developed for deriving network topology using Global Positioning System (GPS) and 24-hour voltage logs. The multi-agent system paradigm and societal structures were examined as an approach to a multi-stakeholder domain and congregations were used as an aid to decentralisation in a non-hierarchical, non-market-based approach. Through formal description of the agent attitude INTEND2, the novel technique of Intention Transfer was applied to an agent congregation to provide an opt-in, collaborative system. Test facilities for multi-agent systems were developed and culminated in a new embedded controller test platform that integrated a real-time dynamic electrical network simulator to provide a full-feedback system integrated with control hardware. Finally, a multi-agent control system was developed and implemented that used location data in providing demand-side response to a voltage excursion, with the goals of improving power quality, reducing generator disconnections, and deferring network reinforcement. The resulting communicating and self-organising energy agent community, as demonstrated on a unique hardware-in-the-loop platform, provides an application model and test facility to inspire agent-based, location-aware smart grid applications across the power systems domain

The role of the city-scale in energy transitions: heat networks in England and Germany

This research explores the role of cities in energy transitions using heat networks as a case study. Drawing on both discursive institutional and socio-technical transitions literature the interaction of discourses, ideas and institutions are analysed in relation to heat networks in England and Germany. Heat networks are framed within this research as embedded within wider debates regarding scales of governance, scale of energy provision and the role of various forms of state, with the co-production of discourses and institutions reflecting the struggle between these competing ideas. The thesis highlights the complex interactions between national and local scales in mediating material change to energy systems. At the local scale, in both countries, there was a growing narrative of the need for local governments to adopt more direct forms of governance in order to secure wider public good benefits of energy infrastructure. In developing heat networks all locations were adopting multiple roles but there was increased focus on ensuring modes of governing. These findings provide an empirical demonstration of the multiple modes of governing adopted by local governments, and suggests that previous assertions that England and Germany are converging on an ‘enabling’ model of climate change governance may no longer be the case. Much discursive institutional literature presents ideas as influencing policy outcomes only when fully formed (Carstensen and Schmidt, 2016; Gillard, 2016), however this research suggests that the contestation of deeply held views can be constituted through not a single large-scale crisis but the amalgamation of several emerging challenges to existing ideas. A loss of confidence in the private sector to deliver the best outcomes, a financially constrained public sector, growing familiarity with sustainable energy projects in many local authorities and increasing recognition of the potential for heat networks to support whole system approaches to decarbonisation all led to ideas about the role of local government in the energy system to be challenged. This provides insight into how ideas can be influential, potentially at different scales, without necessarily being dominant nationally, or used consistently across local actor networks. At the same time obdurate existing storylines, such as the need to de-risk commercial finance, can act to marginalise other storylines. This highlights the complex interaction between dominant and emerging storylines with ideational bricolage at the local level leading to a reappraisal of the role of local government in energy system change. This was, to a degree, providing a route to resist embedded national norms and providing a platform for a stronger local governance role to be debated in relation to decarbonisation and energy system change. Applying a discursive institutional approach is also demonstrated to add richness to explorations of regime politics within socio-technical change, particularly in relation to investigating processes of change at different scales. Socio-technical regimes are often characterised as stable with relatively short periods of change initiated by niche experimentation. Incorporating a discursive approach provides for a more diffuse and gradual explanation for change, enabling exploration of how individual experiments link to long-term debates at both the local and national scale

The big picture:the future role of gas

There are a plethora of drivers of change in energy systems until 2015. The role of social and political actors is likely to be more noticeable. In Europe, locally, high-impact ideas like green consumerism and limited acceptance of energy systems that result in trade-offs will be important. Nationally, the empowerment of individuals and communities and the politicization of energy-related issues will be drivers of change. Internationally, energy issues will become more important in the foreign and security policies of state and non-state actors

China's Long-Term Low-Carbon Development Strategies and Pathways

This open access book introduces a multi-disciplinary and comprehensive research on China's long-term low-carbon emission strategies and pathways. After comprehensively considering China’s own socioeconomic conditions, policy design, energy mix, and other macro-development trends and needs, the research team has proposed suggestions on China’s low-carbon development strategies and pathways until 2050, with required technologies and policies in order to realize the goals of building a great modern socialist country and a beautiful China. These achievements are in conjunction with the climate goals set in the Paris Agreement alongside Global Sustainable Development. The authors hope that the research findings can serve as a reference for all sectors of Chinese society in their climate research efforts, offer support for the formulation and implementation of china’s national low-carbon development strategies and policies, and help the world to better understand China’s story in the general trend of global green and low-carbon development

Dynamic Demand Response in Residential Prosumer Collectives

This research aims at exploring how smart grid opportunities can be leveraged to ameliorate demand response practices for residential prosumer collectives, while meeting the needs of end-users and power grids. Electricity has traditionally been generated in centralized plants then transmitted and distributed to end-users, but the increasing cost-effectiveness of micro-generation (e.g. solar photovoltaics) is resulting in the growth of more decentralized generation. The term "prosumers" is commonly used to refer to energy users (usually households) who engage in small-scale energy production. Of particular interest is the relatively new phenomenon of prosumer collectives, which typically involve interactions between small-scale decentralized generators to optimize their collective energy production and use through sharing, storing and/or trading energy. Drivers of collective prosumerism include sustaining community identity, optimizing energy demand and supply across multiple households, and gaining market power from collective action. Managing power flows in grids integrating intermittent micro-generation (e.g. from solar photovoltaics and micro-wind turbines) presents a challenge for prosumer collectives as well as power grid operators. Smart grid technologies and capabilities provide opportunities for dynamic demand response, where flexible demand can be better matched with variable supply. Ideally, smart grid opportunities should incentivize prosumers to maximize their energy self-consumption from local supply while fairly sharing any income from trading surplus energy, or any loss of utility associated with altering energy demand patterns. New businesses are emerging and developing various products and services around smart grid opportunities to cater for the socio-technical needs of residential prosumer collectives, where technical energy systems overlap with social interactions. This research studies how emerging businesses are using smart grid capabilities to create dynamic demand response solutions for residential prosumer collectives, and how fairness can be adopted in solutions targeting those collectives. This research interweaves social and technical knowledge from literature to interpret the interactions and objectives of prosumer collectives in new ways, and create new socio-technical knowledge around those interpretations. Conducting this research involved using mixed research methods to draw on social science, computer science, and power systems. In the social stream of the research, semi-structured interviews were conducted with executives in businesses providing current or potential smart grid solutions enabling dynamic demand response in residential prosumer collectives. In the technical stream, optimization, computation and game theory concepts were used to develop software algorithms for integrating fairness in allocating shared benefits and loss of utility in collective settings. Interview findings show that new business models and prosumer-oriented solutions are being developed to support the growth of prosumer collectives. Solutions are becoming more software-based, and enabling more socially-conscious user choice. Challenges include dealing with power quality rather than capacity, developing scalable business models and adequate regulatory frameworks, and managing social risks. Automated flexibility management is anticipated to dominate dynamic demand response practices, while the grid is forecast to become one big prosumer community rather than pockets of closed communities. Additionally, the research has developed two software algorithms for residential collectives, to fairly distribute revenue and loss of utility among households. The algorithms used game theory, optimization and approximation algorithms to estimate fair shares with high accuracy using less computation time and memory resources than exact methods

Green Growth Diagnostics for Africa: Literature Review and Scoping Study

This paper reviews the literature for a project which seeks to develop a new Green Growth Diagnostics methodology and apply it to countries in Africa. The original growth diagnostics methodology was developed by Haussmann, Rodrik and Velasco to identify the key constraints holding back economic growth from its full potential. Their approach was driven by the needs of policymakers facing the dilemma that most problems have multiple causes, but governments cannot tackle all of them at once, given limitations in their financial and executive capacity. This gave rise to the idea of concentrating these limited resources on the binding constraint, which would be identified going through a tool conceptualised as a decision tree. The proponents of the original growth diagnostics also realised that this binding constraint varies between countries and - we would argue - between sectors. The central point of the original growth diagnostics method was that it offered researchers and policy makers a way of identifying priorities in analysis and policy; and finding solutions which take into account local conditions. The same rationale applies to our Green Growth Diagnostic project. We build on the original approach but adapt it in four ways: 1. Applying it to the energy sector; 2. Taking into account potential knock-on effects on the economy; 3. The political economy when going from diagnostics to therapeutics; and 4. Working out the distributional consequences. Since each step takes the project into un(der)explored territory, it is built around five research questions and corresponding methodologically distinct work packages. Our five research questions are: 1. What are the binding constraints for investment in economically viable renewable energy?; 2.Which policies can more effectively target different binding constraints?; 3. Who obstructs/drives the adoption of specific sustainable energy policies?; 4. What would be the macroeconomic impacts of an increase in renewable energy investment/capacity, and the reforms needed to bring this increase about? and 5. Under what circumstances increased on-grid renewable energy capacity translates into increased access to and increased reliability of electricity supply in developing countries? This paper pulls together what we can learn from the international literature on these questions

Rules for Watt?:Designing Appropriate Governance Arrangements for the Introduction of Smart Grids

The increasing generation of electricity from renewable energy sources like wind and sun furthers the transition to a sustainable energy system, but at the same time challenges the operation and management of the electricity grid. Smart grids are considered a sustainable and energy-efficient solution to this challenge because they can facilitate the integration of electricity from intermitted renewable energy sources and the accommodation of more fluctuating demand patterns in the distribution grid. The PhD thesis aims to contribute to the improvement of smart grid introduction in practice. Smart grids are considered essential for the Dutch energy transition, but decision-making in energy planning and on smart grid introduction is rather slow and time-consuming. To improve the introduction of smart grids in the Netherlands, this dissertation focusses on the institutional side of decision-making practices, and specifically on the ‘rules of the game’ governing multi-stakeholder local energy planning processes. The research is guided by the research question ‘how can local governance on the introduction of smart grids be improved?’ To address this question, first, governance arrangements inherent to decision-making on the introduction of smart grids in Dutch city districts are studied empirically. This led to three overarching findings: (1) efficiency in local energy planning on the introduction of smart grids is low; (2) there is mostly a lack of residents’ participation in the local planning process of their city district’s energy infrastructure; and (3) several rules-in-use are disabling local energy planning as well as are often conflicting with (experimental) rules-in-form. Based on this, second, two heuristics are developed that can facilitate the introduction of smart grids in local settings: an institutional architecture (of institutional arrangements) and a process architecture (of decision-making functionality). The two heuristics are not only suitable for the introduction of smart grids in Dutch local settings, but also for the realization of additional (integrated) smart energy infrastructures in different contexts