Electricity market design for the prosumer era

Prosumers are agents that both consume and produce energy. With the growth in small and medium-sized agents using solar photovoltaic panels, smart meters, vehicle-to-grid electric automobiles, home batteries and other ‘smart’ devices, prosuming offers the potential for consumers and vehicle owners to re-evaluate their energy practices. As the number of prosumers increases, the electric utility sector of today is likely to undergo significant changes over the coming decades, offering possibilities for greening of the system, but also bringing many unknowns and risks that need to be identified and managed. To develop strategies for the future, policymakers and planners need knowledge of how prosumers could be integrated effectively and efficiently into competitive electricity markets. Here we identify and discuss three promising potential prosumer markets related to prosumer grid integration, peer-to-peer models and prosumer community groups. We also caution against optimism by laying out a series of caveats and complexities

Virtual Power Plant for Residential Demand Response

This report presents the progress done in the first 1.5 years in relation to the PhD project “Virtual Power Plant for Residential Demand Response”. The PhD project aims to gain insight on demand response provision in residential buildings by using a Virtual Power Plant (VPP) in a smart grid scenario. The document shows an architectural overview of the designed VPP and a prototype of the latter based on industrial automation equipment. Furthermore, the report introduces the control strategy of the VPP. This strategy is based on a model predictive control approach to locally optimize energy resources and to provide demand response to an aggregator. In addition, an initial study on prediction models for electricity consumption of residential buildings is presented. Load forecasting models like the ones described are used by the intelligence of the VPP for decision making. The report concludes by outlining the future work together with the planed publications that will lead to timely completion of the PhD study

NOBEL – a neighborhood oriented brokerage electricity and monitoring system

Summary. Distributed generation of energy coming from various vendors, even private homes, is a big challenge for tomorrows power management systems that, unlike today, will not dispatch energy centrally or under central control. On the contrary, the production, distribution and management of energy will be treated and optimized in a distributed manner using local data. Even today, parts of the power system are highly nonlinear with fast changing dynamics. It is hard to predict disturbances and undertake countermeasures on time. In existing approaches electricity is distributed to the final users according to its expected estimated demand. Such non-dynamic approaches, are difficult to evolve and can not accommodate rapid changes in the system. By having a cross-layer and open information flow among the different actors involved we can make better and more timely predictions, and inject new dynamics in the system that will lead to better energy management and achieve better energy savings. The NOBEL project is building an energy brokerage system with which individual energy prosumers can communicate their energy needs directly to both large-scale and small-scale energy producers, thereby making energy use more efficient. Key words: smart grid, smart metering, prosumer, brokerage system, neighborhood management, smart city

Lademanagement für Elektrofahrzeuge

Die vorliegende Arbeit beschreibt ein Lademanagement mit eingebetteter Ladeoptimierung für Elektrofahrzeuge, das ein Flottenbetreiber einer Flotte bzw. ein Ladeinfrastrukturbetreiber einer Gruppe von Privatkunden zur Verfügung stellt. Ziel der Ladeoptimierung ist die gegen den Strompreis sowie feste Lastgrenzen optimierte Berechnung der Ladepläne bei gleichzeitiger Berücksichtigung der Nutzeranforderungen. Diese Ladeoptimierung wird im Rahmen dieser Arbeit konzipiert und implementiert

Lademanagement für Elektrofahrzeuge

The present work describes a charging management with integrated charging optimization for electric vehicles that can be provided to a fleet by a fleet operator or to a group of private customers by a loading infrastructure operator. Aim of this charging optimization is the calculation of an optimized charging plan by considering the electricity price as well as hard capacity boundaries and user requirements. This charging optimization is designed and implemented within the scope of this work

Development of a community-based framework to manage prosumers in smart grid

This dissertation proposes frameworks to address key research challenges of managing prosumers in smart grid in the form of prosumer community groups (PCGs) namely PCG definition and characterization, new prosumer recruitment, multiple goals management and mutual goal definition and member assessment and ranking. The existing literature has very little to offer, by way of either reviewing the related concepts of PCGs or resolving the associated challenges, making our work novel within the research field