Retour à la page précédente

The goal of the project is to make the thermal and electrical flexibility of a high number (10.000-100.000) of Active Demand & Supply (ADS) units (e.g. households) economically available to energy utilities. In order to achieve this, a virtual power plant (VPP) is constructed. Energy utilities should be able to use such a VPP directly on the different markets. The main difficulty in the project is to scale up existing optimization methods in order to be able to work with a high number of heterogenous ADS units.

scaleADS
Because of the political and social “Energiewende”, it is more and more important and needed, that Active Demand & Supply (ADS) units are used for energy and electricity grid services. (The term ADS stands for distributed energy resources, demand response units etc. see also www.usef.info).
In this project, we consider the following ADS types which, typically, can be found in households:
 
  • photovoltaic panels (PV),
  • heat pumps,
  • battery energy storage systems (BESS),
  • combined heat and power systems (CHP) and controllable loads (e.g. washing machine), and
  • thermostatically controlled loads (TCL) (e.g. water or space heater).
 
Although the considered ADS types are responsible for most of the available thermal and electrical flexibility in households, a large number of them have to be pooled in order to be able to provide relevant energy or grid services. In previous publications, it was already shown, how to pool one of these types across many households. It is also well known, how to control all of these types for a single household and how to provide different additional services. However, what is missing and what this project is all about, is to provide a commercial solution, how to pool a large number of heterogenous ADS of different types. This last step is required in order to get to economical meaningful applications.
 
Our project partner Misurio does have commercial solutions available for energy utilities, which enable the control of single ADS as well as for controlling a VPP and using its flexibility in the different markets in an economic good way. In order to pool the large number of ADS into a VPP, a pre- and post-processing is needed: On the one hand, the individual capabilities of the ADS have to aggregated in some way. On the other hand, the control signals of the VPP have to be met by the ADS without violating their local constraints. Additionally, the computational complexity of both the pre- and post-processing have to be limited so that the requirements of the grid and energy services can be met time-wise.
 
Start 10 / 2016
End 09 / 2018
Funding CTI, Misurio