Electrification of Smart Cities

Electrification plays a key role in decarbonizing energy consumption for various sectors, including transportation, heating, and cooling. There are several essential infrastructures for a smart city, including smart grids and transportation networks. These infrastructures are the complementary solutions to successfully developing novel services, with enhanced energy efficiency and energy security. Five papers are published in this Special Issue that cover various key areas expanding the state-of-the-art in smart cities’ electrification, including transportation, healthcare, and advanced closed-circuit televisions for smart city surveillance

Overview of Canada’s Legislative and Regulatory Systems and their Impact on Community Energy Planning

The imperative for climate change planning in Canada to drive down greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions has compelled municipalities to develop and implement community energy plans. Today, more than 200 communities across Canada, representing over 50% of the population, have an energy plan. CEP is an increasingly popular strategy for municipalities to reduce GHG emissions, build resiliency, and create local economic benefits. Due to this significant uptake in CEP nationwide, it is important to understand the impact it is having on multi-level governance systems, as very little is known about the influence CEP has on regional-level institutional, infrastructural, and land use systems. Communities across Canada exist within an energy system that is interdependent in terms of infrastructure and regulatory regimes, so barriers can arise due to issues such as lack of capacity and experience. A divided and territorialised energy system that operates across different levels of government can impede community energy plan outcomes, at times unknowingly due to the lack of research literature on this topic. To help mitigate this problem, this paper identifies alignments, misalignments and gaps in the legislative and regulatory environment across jurisdictions to assist municipalities with better community energy plan development and implementation, and assist policymakers to enact legislation that supports CEP and embedded jurisdictional goals such as GHG targets. This major research paper begins with an overview of community energy planning theory and approaches to lay a foundation on which to build a more complex illustration of CEP in Canada, and more specifically Ontario and British Columbia. Common barriers to CEP are identified between the jurisdictions, including a lack of capacity and experience. A review of the jurisdictional regulatory and institutional structures related to ‘behind the meter’ programs, initiatives, and technologies is also included to provide a greater understanding of CEP enabling factors, including the net meter and smart meter programs. A series of policy and program options are included as recommendations for government to further support CEP goals and objectives, and as solutions to the misalignments, gaps and barriers identified throughout this research. Recommendations were crafted based on desk-top policy research and targeted interviews with key institutional and non-state actors, academics and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) active in the CEP field

Heterogeneous Electric Vehicle Charging Coordination: A Variable Charging Speed Approach

We present a coordination mechanism that reduces peak demand coming from EV charging, supports grid stability and environmental sustainability. The proposed mechanism accounts for individual commuting preferences, as well as desired states of charge by certain deadlines, which can serve as a proxy for range anxiety. It can shape EV charging toward a desired profile, without violating individual preferences. Our mechanism mitigates herding, which is typical in populations where all agents receive the same price signals and make similar charging decisions. Furthermore, it assumes no prior knowledge about EV customers and therefore learns preferences and reactions to prices dynamically. We show through simulations that our mechanism induces a less volatile demand and lower peaks compared to currently used benchmarks

Field Notes: Equity & State Climate Policy

For more than a decade, states and cities across the country have served a leadership role in advancing science-informed climate policy through city, state and multi-state efforts. The rapid pace by which state climate policy is emerging is evidenced by the number of new laws, directives and policies adopted in 2018 and the first half of 2019 alone. Currently, there is an active ongoing dialogue across the U.S. regarding the intersection of climate and equity objectives with efforts targeted at addressing needs of disadvantaged communities and consumers. This climate/equity intersection is due to several factors, including recognition by many cities and states that climate change is and will continue to have a disproportionate impact on certain populations and will exacerbate existing stressors faced by disadvantaged communities and consumers. Research indicates that a greater proportion of environmental burden exists in geographic areas with majority populations of people of color, low-income residents, and/or indigenous people. It is well known that certain households (including some that are low-income, African American, Latino, multi-family and rural) spend a larger portion on their income on home energy costs. States and stakeholders are realizing that a transition to a low-carbon future by mid-century will require significantly increased participation of disadvantaged communities and households in the benefits of climate and clean energy programs

Hydrogen and Peer-to-Peer Energy Exchanges for Deep Decarbonization of Power Systems

Decreasing costs of renewable energy resources and net-zero emission energy production policy, set by U.S. government, are two preeminent factors that motivate power utilities to deploy more system- or consumer-centric distributed energy resources (DERs) to decarbonize electricity production. Since, deep energy decarbonization cannot be achieved without high penetration of renewable energy sources, utilities should develop and invest in new business models for power system operation and planning during the energy transition. Considering the pathways to deeply decarbonize power systems, first, this dissertation proposes a novel hierarchical peer-to-peer (P2P) energy market design in active distribution networks. The framework integrates the distributional locational marginal price to a multi-round double auction with average price mechanism to integrate the network usage charges into the bills of customers. Second, this dissertation investigates the role of grid-integrated hydrogen (H2) systems for improved utility operations and to supply fuel to transportation sector. Power quality concerns as well as risk of uncertain parameters are considered using conditional value at risk based epsilon constraint method. Third, this dissertation proposes a bi-level proactive rolling-horizon based scheduling of H2 systems in integrated distribution and transmission networks considering the flexibility of these assets as controllable load or generation, in addressing the utility operators\u27 normal and emergency operation signals. Fourth, a detailed model is developed for grid-integrated Electrolyzer considering polarization curve and non-linear conversion efficiency of these assets in the P2P enabled distribution network. This framework shows that reasonable penetration of P2P energy exchanges can significantly lower the H2 production cost. Finally, this dissertation proposes a cyber-physical vulnerability assessment of P2P energy exchanges in an unbalanced active distribution networks. Simulation results of this dissertation show the effectiveness of the proposed frameworks

Towards auction mechanisms for peer-to-peer energy trading in smart grids

The conventional energy grid is being replaced with the new emerging smart grid infras- tructure. This can be attributed to the fact that it only supports unidirectional energy ow, i.e., energy is transmitted from the producer to the consumer. Smart grid addresses issues such as grid reliability, blackouts, global warming, etc, by implementing various renewable energy sources readily available for consumer use. The clean electric power can be produced from local neighbourhoods, individual houses, to large industrial businesses. Therefore, with the im- plementation of alternative energy sources readily available, users connected to the smart grid can purchase electric power, enabling groups and individuals to generate a profitable income. However, challenges persist attributed to user cost, and power management, resulting in active work to investigate optimization techniques between users in P2P energy trading to enhance the performance of how users trade energy among each other. Among the various energy trading mechanisms, auction-based models have demonstrated excellent performance, targetting desir- able properties for P2P energy trading. In this work, we present three different auction-based models that can be utilized for practical energy trading. The prosumers (producers and con- sumers) of energy, play the role as sellers or buyers depending on the current supply and demand. Sellers with renewable energy sources participate to sell their excess of energy to generate a profit and satisfy the buyers' demand. We model the interaction with as single-sided and double-sided auctions, explicitly taking the dynamic nature of both the sellers and buyers into account. We further propose a profit maximization algorithm that considers power line cost, transmission capacity, and energy distribution. With theoretical analysis and simulations, we demonstrate that the proposed auctions are individually rational, truthful, computationally efficient, and budget-balanced