January 2011 Archives

The energy sector is in transition. Firstly, the liberalisation process forces companies to restructure their value chain in order to increase their market efficiency. Secondly, in order to reduce carbon emissions, the use of renewable energy sources is enforced by national and international regulations. Thirdly, smart metering is being widely adopted and with it consumers will be involved actively. The main goal of the project is to develop an ICT system that fits the future liberalised energy sector and enables the integration of a higher rate of distributed and renewable energy sources into the electricity grid. We will explore an approach for demand (and supply) side management in which electricity consumers and producers issue flex-offers indicating flexibilities in time and amount of the electricity. These flex-offers will be processed by our system in order to balance electricity supply and demand in near real-time and thus allow to use not-schedulable renewable energy sources much better.

This document describes the strategy and instruments to be used for disseminating and exploiting results obtained in the MIRACLE project.

Deregulation of energy markets and environmental sustainability pose major challenges for modern energy systems. As increased efficiency and flexibility are sought at all levels, new services are needed to ensure reliable supply, utilize the renewable energy sources (RES), and balance the costs and benefits of the involved parties. Information and communication technology (ICT) plays a key role in pursuing these goals. In this context, the FP7 project MIRACLE (Micro-Request-Based Aggregation, Forecasting and Scheduling of Energy Demand, Supply and Distribution) is developing a conceptual and infrastructural approach allowing electricity distributors to balance supply and demand and increase the amounts of energy from RES.

Most renewable energy sources (RES; e.g., windmills or solar panels) pose the challenge that the production depends on external factors such as wind speed and the amount of sunlight. Hence, available power from RES cannot be planned as traditional energy sources. As a result, there is the need for balancing energy demand and supply in order to integrate more renewable energy sources. Accurate and efficient forecasts for short-term and mid-term horizons of energy consumption and production are a fundamental precondition for this dynamic and fine-grained scheduling of energy demand and supply. The state-of-the-art of forecasting energy demand and supply mainly focus on high accuracy forecasting of energy demand, while only few techniques exist for energy supply. In addition, there are further challenges. First, with regard to balancing energy demand and supply, forecasting takes place in a distributed system architecture that is inherently given by the hierarchy of involved organizations. Second, the large scale of the distributed system, in combination with a continuous stream of updates, leads to the requirement of efficient forecasting and forecast model maintenance for evolving time series. Beside these general challenges, we observe the need for (1) awareness of specified flexibilities and (2) integration of external information sources in order to achieve high accuracy forecast results.

The new EU directive sets ambitious targets for all EU countries, such as to reach 20% share of energy from renewable sources by 2020. Many countries which started implementing this directive are facing the same problem - the production from renewable energy sources (RES, e.g., windmills, solar panels) cannot be planned, but can only be predicted. Thus, electrical power produced by RES usually does not match the energy consumption, and it must be discarded or given away for free.

The aim of the MIRACLE project is to exploit potential flexibility in both demand for and generation of electricity to compensate for the intermittent nature of Renewable Energy Sources (RES). For instance by postponing certain electricity demand until energy from a RES (e.g. solar panel) becomes available.

In order to leverage flexibility in demand and generation means for expressing and communicating this flexibility are needed. For this purpose, this MIRACLE deliverable provides a data model. This document contains the first version of the data model; a subsequent deliverable D2.3 will follow in M18 of the MIRACLE project and will provide further enhancements and elaborations.

The energy sector is in transition. Firstly, the deregulation process forces companies to restructure their value chain in order to increase their market efficiency. Secondly, in order to reduce carbon emissions, the use of renewable energy sources is enforced by national and international regulations. Thirdly, smart metering is being widely adopted. The main goal of the project is to develop an Information Communication Technology (ICT) system that fits the future deregulated energy sector and enables the integration of a higher rate of distributed and renewable energy sources into the electricity grid. We will explore an approach for demand (and supply) side management in which electricity consumers and producers issue flex-offers indicating flexibilities in time and amount of the electricity. These flex-offers will be processed by our system in order to balance electricity supply and demand in near real-time.