A social engagement Fast Track on Energy Communities-Key Lesson Learned from H2020 EU Projects

Energy communities organise collective and citizen-driven energy actions that will help pave the way for a clean energy transition, while moving citizens to the forefront. The energy market is rapidly transforming and so is the role of the consumer. Yesterday’s passive consumers become central actors in today’s energy markets. Today, as prosumers, citizens can benefit from their generation, consumption, and storage capabilities. Moreover, by supporting social engagement and citizen participation, energy communities can help provide flexibility to the electricity system through demand response, storage, and peer-to-peer energy exchange. Based on the collective debate from nine H2020 running projects (Renaissance, COMETS, Sender, eCREW, Lightness, ReDream, HESTIA, UP-STAIRS and NRG2peers), several challenges and key lessons learned can be identified for just social engagement. These challenges and lessons are relevant for the present and future development of EU energy communities

HCI for Blockchain: Studying, Designing, Critiquing and Envisioning Distributed Ledger Technologies

This workshop aims to develop an agenda within the CHI community to address the emergence of blockchain, or distributed ledger technologies (DLTs). As blockchains emerge as a general purpose technology, with applications well beyond cryptocurrencies, DLTs present exciting challenges and opportunities for developing new ways for people and things to transact, collaborate, organize and identify themselves. Requiring interdisciplinary skills and thinking, the field of HCI is well placed to contribute to the research and development of this technology. This workshop will build a community for human-centred researchers and practitioners to present studies, critiques, design-led work, and visions of blockchain applications

Trading Electricity with Blockchain Systems

On the wave of the development of new ICT technologies and renewable energy, the power system will certainly experience great changes to its outdated architecture over the next several decades. One of the key drivers of change in the power system is distributed energy resources. They are completely changing the paradigm of the power system as a system with a centralized hierarchy and one-way power flows from generation to customer and from high voltage to low voltage. Because the goals of net zero greenhouse gas emissions are gathering pace and are being accepted by countries around the world, slowdown in the integration of distributed energy resources cannot be expected. Another reason why we can expect faster integration is the development of technology for energy production which is becoming more available to power consumers. Because of the problems that are currently occurring in the distribution system, it is clear that the system must be modernized in line with the development of these technologies. The technology that will likely have the greatest impact on the modernization of the power system is blockchain technology combined with the smart grid paradigm. Blockchain has the ability to completely change the way the power system is managed and optimized for performance

Using Blockchain and Artificial Intelligence in Energy Management as a Tool to Achieve Energy Efficiency

Improving energy management has received a lot of attention due to environmental issues, energy crises, and growing energy prices in today’s world. Various digital technologies have been developed to enhance energy management to cover these challenges. This article investigates Blockchain and Artificial Intelligence, which have recently attracted increasing attention. The study applies the software of VOSviewer for providing bibliometric analysis. The data (pull of the scientific documents) was generated from the Scopus and Web of Science. There have been done a critical analysis of the literature for evaluating the research in the proposed area. This paper focuses on possible use cases of blockchain and artificial intelligence technologies and considers aspects of technology used to achieve energy efficiency. The findings showed that the technologies are widely applied in energy management. Besides, it is lack of documents that contain the terms ‘energy efficiency and ‘blockchain’. The results of analysis confirm that artificial intelligence has been rapidly integrating with energy management, helping to develop more efficient and secure energy generation techniques

Thermoeconomic cost assessment in future district heating networks

This paper aims at showing the capabilities of thermoeconomic analysis for solving cost assessments in district heating systems both at user and producer sides. In the near future it is expected that multiple producers are allowed to supply heat to the same district heating network, similarly to what happens in the case of the electric grid. Not only the amount of heat they may produce should be properly accounted, but also its quality, and also the pumping power that is requested to supply a unity of thermal energy to the endusers. Moreover, buildings equipped with low temperature heating system allow better use of the thermal energy vector, thus allowing larger efficiency of thermal plants. In the present work, the use of thermoeconomics for the analysis of these aspects is proposed. The approach allows one performing cost assessment in district heating, taking into account the effects of investment and operating costs and thermodynamic irreversibilities in the cost formation of heat from its production in the plants to its use in the buildings. Simple examples are analyzed in order to provide a quantitative evaluation of the various cost terms, depending on the operating conditions, topology and characteristics of the users/producers

Blockchain outlook for deployment of IoT in distribution networks and smart homes

Nowadays, unlike depleting fossil fuel resources, the integration of different types of renewable energy, as distributed generation sources, into power systems is accelerated and the technological development in this area is evolving at a frantic pace. Thus, inappropriate use of them will be irrecoverably detrimental. The power industry will reach a turning point in the pervasiveness of these infinite energy sources by three factors. Climate changes due to greenhouse gas accumulation in the atmosphere; increased demand for energy consumption all over the world, especially after the genesis of Bitcoin and base cryptocurrencies; and establishing a comprehensive perspective for the future of renewable energy. The increase in the pervasiveness of renewable energy sources in small-scale brings up new challenges for the power system operators to manage an abundant number of small-scale generation sources, called microsources. The current structure of banking systems is unable to handle such massive and high-frequency transactions. Thus the incorporation of cryptocurrencies is inevitable. In addition, by utilization of IoT-enabled devices, a large body of data will be produced must be securely transferred, stored, processed, and managed in order to boost the observability, controllability, and the level of autonomy of the smart power systems. Then the appropriate controlling measures must be performed through control signals in order to serve the loads in a stable, uninterruptible, reliable, and secure way. The data acquires from IoT devices must be analyzed using artificial intelligence methods such as big data techniques, data mining, machine learning, etc. with a scant delay or almost real-time. These measures are the controversial issues of modern power systems, which are yet a matter of debate. This study delves into the aforementioned challenges and opportunities, and the corresponding solutions for the incorporation of IoT and blockchain in power systems, particularly in the distribution level and residential section, are addressed. In the last section, the role of IoT in smart buildings and smart homes, especially for energy hubs schemes and the management of residential electric vehicle supply equipment is concisely discussed