Bridging the Attitude-Behaviour Gap in Household Energy Consumption

The attitude-behaviour gap in energy consumption refers to the imparity between people's environmental values (and attitudes) and their actual behavior in consumption. This paper calls for the facilitation of the behaviour change process that is implementable in the context of one's everyday life to address the attitude-behaviour gap in household energy consumption. Two interrelated intervention design constructs are proposed based on the results of literature review, namely (1) providing consumers accurate information about actionable suggestions in the specific context of their everyday life, and (2) fostering consumers' motivation to engage in the behavior change process towards energy conservation. Smart Grid technologies are instrumental in both intervention types.Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.System Engineerin

Storage coordination and peak-shaving operation in urban areas with high renewable penetration

As renewable power generation gains importance, balancing of power demand and supply becomes more and more challenging. This paper addresses this challenge by exploring the potential of individually-owned storage units in decentralised power systems with a high share of renewables. The focus is on the influence of coordination and peak-shaving operation of these individual units in realistic urban areas. Currently extensive amount of research exits on specific applications related to storage coordination. However, in these studies often simplified consumer models are used. This study considers a representative mixed residential and commercial neighbourhood in Amsterdam. The influence of storage coordination and peak-shaving operation on the neighbourhood's energy autonomy and on the peakiness of the power exchanged with the main grid are addressed. Results show that, compared to individual storage operation, coordinated storage operation increases renewable energy utilisation by 39%, decreases the excess energy transferred to the grid by almost threefold and increases the neighbourhood self-sufficiency by 21%. Peak-shaving operation reduces the highest power peak of the year by 55%. These results are statistically significant (p-value < 10-4). Thus, in realistic urban areas storage coordination improves local energy autonomy, while peak-shaving operation reduces peaks in power flows exchanged with the main grid.System Engineerin

Statistical Data-Driven Regression Method for Urban Electricity Demand Modelling

As the focus of the energy transition within cities worldwide moves towards local communities and neighbourhoods, the need for insights in the dynamics of local electricity demand increases. Detailed local electricity demand information is, however, often not available. This paper proposes a statistical data-driven method to model local electricity demand for mixed urban areas, using a combination of other openly available datasets. Such datasets however are mutually incompatible without further conversion. The proposed method over- comes this problem. Linear regression is used to combine these different datasets, whereby the regression coefficients have the meaning of scaling factors for different types of electricity consumers (households, offices, shops, etc.). The method is calibrated and validated using respectively a training and a test dataset of Dutch municipalities, yielding R-squared values for most consumer types between 61% and 98%. The application of the method for local electricity demand modelling is illustrated for three Dutch municipalities with different consumer compositions.Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.System Engineerin

Self-determined distribution of local energy resources for ensuring power supply during outages

Ensuring access to reliable and sustainable power supply is becoming more and more challenging due to a combination of factors such as more frequent power grid outages caused by extreme weather events, the large-scale introduction of renewable energy resources that increases the complexity of the power system, but also aging infrastructure, supply and demand imbalance and power theft in some areas. Combined, all these factors can cause outages and together they can make electricity supply unreliable. The implications of this are many, ranging from minor inconveniences to major failures of critical infrastructures. A potential solution to ensure power supply during outages is to use local generation in the form of renewable resources to supply energy. This paper proposes a community-based mechanism that demonstrates that when community members can determine for themselves how excess energy generation is distributed, the power supply of specific members can be ensured. Self-determination is achieved by prioritizing and differentiating between community members as well as automatically and continuously redistributing energy, thereby adapting to sudden changes in supply and demand. Simulation results show that the proposed mechanism can be used to empower local communities to decide for themselves how local resources are distributed during events such as outages, ensuring prolonged power supply for differentiated members of affected communities. Harnessing the potential of renewable resources and smart technologies for intelligent coordination through empowerment of consumers to become pro-active participants is a promising solution for the future power systems.System Engineerin

Dynamic, self-organized clusters as a means to supply and demand matching in large-scale energy systems

Centralized management of power systems is becoming more challenging due to the increased introduction of distributed renewable energy resources, along with demand increase and aging infrastructures. To address these challenges, this paper proposes new mechanisms for decentralized energy management. Based on self-organization of consumers, prosumers and producers into virtual groups, called clusters, supply and demand of electricity is locally matched. Distributed multi-agent systems are used as a way to represent virtual cluster members. The mechanisms are illustrated, and static and dynamic virtual clusters are compared. Dynamic reconfiguration is achieved by varying the time periods for which clustering is performed. The proposed clustering mechanisms demonstrate that large-scale centralized energy systems can operate in a decentralized fashion when only local information is available.System Engineerin

Ad Hoc communication topology switching during disasters from altruistic to individualistic and Back

Disaster communication has made immense progress in the last thirty years. At present, disaster research focuses on bottom-up approaches such as civilian inclusion in disaster response. With the advent of smartphones, citizen-based emergency communication has become possible. Present ad hoc communication technologies typically form a fully connected mesh network, which connects all phones that are within each other's transmission range. This facilitates low-latency direct communication between citizens, but it quickly drains the battery of phones. Alternative ad hoc communication networks form an adaptive energy-efficient network topology, that is most draining to batteries of phones that have a higher charge, while low-energy phones are spared from relaying messages, thereby preserving battery and thus maintaining their connection with the rescue communication network. Both of these approaches have their own advantages. Which one is best for communication needs depends on the context. This position paper discusses the possibility of a decision model as an approach to automatically switch between the two alternative ad hoc communication networks. This ensures that citizens in disasters can make use of the optimal communication system at all times.System EngineeringMulti Actor System

Designing inclusion and continuity for resilient communication during disasters

This paper addresses the challenge of establishing a resilient disaster communication system that transitions seamlessly from a phone-based ad hoc network to any portable infrastructure and back. For this purpose, this paper presents a value-based design of an autonomous and self-organized protocol (SOS-hybrid). This design ensures seamless integration between various communication networks taking local context into account to increase inclusion and continuity of connectivity. SOS-hybrid has two benefits. First, local self-organization can adapt to the local situation in a disaster area. Second, context-awareness can fill in the spatial gaps of coverage associated with top-down approaches. An agent-based modelling approach was used to develop the simulation of the proposed communication network to evaluate the impact of introducing SOS-hybrid in the aftermath of a disaster. SOS-hybrid allows phones to simultaneously provide the benefits of (i) ad hoc mobile networking, allowing hard-to-reach people to connect, and (ii) infrastructure-based communication, allowing phones to more efficiently send messages over long distances. Benefits include two-way communication between community and rescue operators, inclusion and continued connectivity for immobile citizens stuck in isolated out of coverage areas, and seamless transition without loss of messages.Water ResourcesSystem EngineeringMulti Actor System

Understanding spatio-temporal electricity demand at different urban scales: A data-driven approach

Cities and communities worldwide are seeking to become more sustainable by transitioning to renewable energy resources, and by introducing electric transportation and heating. The impact and suitability of such technologies for a given area heavily depend on local conditions, such as characteristics of local demand. In particular, the shape of a local demand profile is an important determinant for how much renewable energy can be used directly, and how charging of electric vehicles and use of electric heating affect a local grid. Unfortunately, a systematic understanding of local demand characteristics on different urban scales (neighbourhoods, districts and municipalities) is currently lacking in literature. Most energy transition studies simplify local demand to household demand only. This paper addresses this knowledge gap by providing a novel data-driven classification and analysis of demand profiles and energy user compositions in nearly 15000 neighbourhoods, districts and municipalities, based on data from the Netherlands. The results show that on all urban scales, three types of areas can be distinguished. In this paper, these area types are termed “residential”, “business” and “mixed”, based on the most prevalent energy users in each. Statistic analysis of the results shows that area types are pairwise significantly different, both in terms of their profiles and in terms of their energy user composition. Moreover, residential-type demand profiles are found only in a small number of areas. These results emphasise the importance of using local detailed spatio-temporal demand profiles to support the transition of urban areas to sustainable energy generation, transportation and heating. To facilitate the implementation of the obtained insights in other models, a spreadsheet modelling tool is provided in an addendum to this paper.System Engineerin

The case for coordinated energy storage in future distribution grids

The integration of distributed renewable energy resources in urban power systems requires locally tailored approaches. This study analyses the impact of storage penetration and its coordination in three representative urban areas in Amsterdam: a residential, a business and a mixed area. Results show considerable benefits of storage and its coordination in all three areas, assuming a high (50%) penetration of solar panels. Self-consumption of locally generated renewable energy increases from 70% without storage to 80% with individually used storage and to over 90% with coordinated storage. Self-sufficiency increases from 17% without storage to almost 40% with coordinated storage. These results make a case for coordinated use of storage units to support the integration of renewable resources in future distribution grids in a variety of urban areas.System Engineerin

Self-organizing topology for energy-efficient ad-hoc communication networks of mobile devices

When physical communication network infrastructures fail, infrastructure-less communication networks such as mobile ad-hoc networks (MANET), can provide an alternative. This, however, requires MANETs to be adaptable to dynamic contexts characterized by the changing density and mobility of devices and availability of energy sources. To address this challenge, this paper proposes a decentralized context-adaptive topology control protocol. The protocol consists of three algorithms and uses preferential attachment based on the energy availability of devices to form a loop-free scale-free adaptive topology for an ad-hoc communication network. The proposed protocol has a number of advantages. First, it is adaptive to the environment, hence applicable in scenarios where the number of participating mobile devices and their availability of energy resources is always changing. Second, it is energy-efficient through changes in the topology. This means it can be flexibly combined with different routing protocols. Third, the protocol requires no changes on the hardware level. This means it can be implemented on all current phones, without any recalls or investments in hardware changes. The evaluation of the protocol in a simulated environment confirms the feasibility of creating and maintaining a self-adaptive ad-hoc communication network, consisting of multitudes of mobile devices for reliable communication in a dynamic context.System EngineeringMulti Actor System