Publications: September 2010 Archives

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 adaptation.

The energy sector is in transition. First, the deregulation forces companies to restructure their value chain in order to increase their market efficiency. Second, to reduce carbon emissions, the use of renewable energy sources is enforced by national and international regulations. Third, smart metering is being widely adopted. The main goal of the MIRACLE project is to develop an ICT system that will enable the integration of a higher rate of distributed and renewable energy sources into the electricity grid by using flexibilities in energy demand and supply. The system will provide the means to issue so-called micro-requests indicating these power profile flexibilities (e.g., shifting in time or changing the energy amount) and to process the micro-request data in a hierarchical fashion. Consumers and producers own appliances and devices such as electric heat pumps, electric vehicles, washing machines, dishwashers, photovoltaic cells, urban wind turbines and micro combined heat and power units. The developed system enables customers and energy companies 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.