D7.5 MIRABEL-ONE: Initial draft of the MIRABEL Standard

Use of renewable energy sources is enforced by national and international regulations.
Drivers for such policies include mitigation of climate change due to emission of
greenhouse gasses and reducing dependency on fossil fuel reserves. Due to the
intermittent character of renewable energy sources such as photovoltaic or wind power,
integration of such sources creates a challenge in maintaining balance between demand
and supply. Indications of such challenges in countries with e.g. a high penetration of
wind power are already showing in prices on power exchanges reaching zero or negative
energy prices. In general, without mitigation measures, an increase in the use of
intermittent renewable energy sources leads to a diminished ability to guarantee security
of supply.

One of the possibilities to deal with this uncertainty of renewable energy sources is the
exploitation of flexibility in electricity demand and supply. Consumers and producers own
devices in which flexibility in electricity demand and supply is possible, such as washing
machines, dishwashers, photovoltaic cells, micro combined heat and power units, electric
heat pumps, and electric vehicles. These flexibilities include temporal shifts of activities
(e.g. delay operation), temporary reductions of load comparable to existing demand
response scheme's and adjustments in load profiles of charging of electric vehicles.

These flexibilities can be taken into consideration when scheduling the load and
distributed generation. Thereby, such a system enables electricity suppliers to balance
energy demand and supply in near real-time and thus, allows the integration of more
renewable energy sources whose availability cannot be influenced. The use of flexibility is
scheduled and is negotiated with the party offering the flexibility.

The goal of this document is to define a specification for modeling of such flexibility and
the exchange of flexibility information between stakeholders in the energy domain,
especially between consumers and electricity suppliers. The specification is described in
terms of a generic data model for energy flexibility and messages for information
exchange on flexibility offerings. The intention of this specification is to use it as input for
formal European standardization and acceptance in the electricity market. More
specifically, the document will be used as input to a CEN Workshop in 2012 that
produces a CEN Workshop Agreement (CWA) in a relatively short and constructive time
period.

By setting such a standard and the adoption of it in the electricity market, the consumer
gets more and more involved in energy management within the local household, building
or premise and with the connecting smart grid. Moreover, the European Commission, in
the context of the 2020 initiative for an Energy Strategy, established at the end of 2009 a
Smart Grid Task Force which identified in its work program that "Consumer
empowerment includes capabilities of consumers to have sufficient and timely information
on their actual energy consumption, to learn and act upon their energy savings potential
through energy usage optimisation and more energy efficient technologies, to have
access to competitive offers for energy services and to develop energy efficient
consumption practices." The specification and the intended standard based on it is
intended to add to this objective. The specification assumes is that the energy
management system is a black box that produces offerings of flexibility. How these
offerings are being generated, whether they are aggregations of multiple devices at the premises or which devices are involved is of less importance for this specification.
Moreover, it can be used for each of these situations.

The target audience of this document is all kinds of stakeholders in the energy domain
that are directly or indirectly involved in the intended information exchange. This includes
energy service providers, energy system/network operators, grid users, but also ICT
service suppliers, European branch organizations, regulators and public authorities,
research institutes and non-governmental organisations acting on environment matters.

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