Demand and Storage Management in a Prosumer Nanogrid Based on Energy Forecasting

Energy efficiency and consumers' role in the energy system are among the strategic research topics in power systems these days. Smart grids (SG) and, specifically, microgrids, are key tools for these purposes. This paper presents a three-stage strategy for energy management in a prosumer nanogrid. Firstly, energy monitoring is performed and time-space compression is applied as a tool for forecasting energy resources and power quality (PQ) indices; secondly, demand is managed, taking advantage of smart appliances (SA) to reduce the electricity bill; finally, energy storage systems (ESS) are also managed to better match the forecasted generation of each prosumer. Results show how these strategies can be coordinated to contribute to energy management in the prosumer nanogrid. A simulation test is included, which proves how effectively the prosumers' power converters track the power setpoints obtained from the proposed strategy.Spanish Agencia Estatal de Investigacion ; Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional

Smart Grid for the Smart City

Modern cities are embracing cutting-edge technologies to improve the services they offer to the citizens from traffic control to the reduction of greenhouse gases and energy provisioning. In this chapter, we look at the energy sector advocating how Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and signal processing techniques can be integrated into next generation power grids for an increased effectiveness in terms of: electrical stability, distribution, improved communication security, energy production, and utilization. In particular, we deliberate about the use of these techniques within new demand response paradigms, where communities of prosumers (e.g., households, generating part of their electricity consumption) contribute to the satisfaction of the energy demand through load balancing and peak shaving. Our discussion also covers the use of big data analytics for demand response and serious games as a tool to promote energy-efficient behaviors from end users

Big Data Analytics for QoS Prediction Through Probabilistic Model Checking

As competitiveness increases, being able to guaranting QoS of delivered services is key for business success. It is thus of paramount importance the ability to continuously monitor the workflow providing a service and to timely recognize breaches in the agreed QoS level. The ideal condition would be the possibility to anticipate, thus predict, a breach and operate to avoid it, or at least to mitigate its effects. In this paper we propose a model checking based approach to predict QoS of a formally described process. The continous model checking is enabled by the usage of a parametrized model of the monitored system, where the actual value of parameters is continuously evaluated and updated by means of big data tools. The paper also describes a prototype implementation of the approach and shows its usage in a case study.Comment: EDCC-2014, BIG4CIP-2014, Big Data Analytics, QoS Prediction, Model Checking, SLA compliance monitorin

Smart Asset Management for Electric Utilities: Big Data and Future

This paper discusses about future challenges in terms of big data and new technologies. Utilities have been collecting data in large amounts but they are hardly utilized because they are huge in amount and also there is uncertainty associated with it. Condition monitoring of assets collects large amounts of data during daily operations. The question arises "How to extract information from large chunk of data?" The concept of "rich data and poor information" is being challenged by big data analytics with advent of machine learning techniques. Along with technological advancements like Internet of Things (IoT), big data analytics will play an important role for electric utilities. In this paper, challenges are answered by pathways and guidelines to make the current asset management practices smarter for the future.Comment: 13 pages, 3 figures, Proceedings of 12th World Congress on Engineering Asset Management (WCEAM) 201

Efficient ICT for efficient smart grids

In this extended abstract the need for efficient and reliable ICT is discussed. Efficiency of ICT not only deals with energy-efficient ICT hardware, but also deals with efficient algorithms, efficient design methods, efficient networking infrastructures, etc. Efficient and reliable ICT is a prerequisite for efficient Smart Grids. Unfortunately, efficiency and reliability have not always received the proper attention in the ICT domain in the past

Software Defined Networks based Smart Grid Communication: A Comprehensive Survey

The current power grid is no longer a feasible solution due to ever-increasing user demand of electricity, old infrastructure, and reliability issues and thus require transformation to a better grid a.k.a., smart grid (SG). The key features that distinguish SG from the conventional electrical power grid are its capability to perform two-way communication, demand side management, and real time pricing. Despite all these advantages that SG will bring, there are certain issues which are specific to SG communication system. For instance, network management of current SG systems is complex, time consuming, and done manually. Moreover, SG communication (SGC) system is built on different vendor specific devices and protocols. Therefore, the current SG systems are not protocol independent, thus leading to interoperability issue. Software defined network (SDN) has been proposed to monitor and manage the communication networks globally. This article serves as a comprehensive survey on SDN-based SGC. In this article, we first discuss taxonomy of advantages of SDNbased SGC.We then discuss SDN-based SGC architectures, along with case studies. Our article provides an in-depth discussion on routing schemes for SDN-based SGC. We also provide detailed survey of security and privacy schemes applied to SDN-based SGC. We furthermore present challenges, open issues, and future research directions related to SDN-based SGC.Comment: Accepte