Alessandro Burgio

Energy Management System for an Energy District With Demand Response Availability

During recent years the electricity supply chain (electricity production, consumption, distribution, storage, and load management) has changed. In this context a new term appears: the prosumer, that is both a consumer and producer of energy in the same entity. In the paper, an energy management approach of several prosumers aggregated in a coalition, the energy district (ED), and coordinated through a central control entity, the coalition coordinator, is proposed. The aim of the coalition coordinator is to maximize the coalition utility also reducing in this way the reverse energy flows at the point of delivery by an appropriate demand response program. The application on an Italian residential housing area is illustrated. The numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness and attractiveness of the proposed energy management scheme.

An incremental conductance method with variable step size for MPPT: Design and implementation

In this paper the authors propose a novel method for tracking the maximum power point of a PV array. This method is derived by the well known incremental conductance method and the novelty consists in varying the duty cycle of the dc-dc switching converter used as MPPT tracker using a variable step size instead of a fixed step size. A practical way to determine the minimum and the maximum values of the variable step size is explained in detail. The laboratory results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method both in terms of speed in MPP tracking and accuracy in the MPP individuation.

In the future Smart Cities: Coordination of micro Smart Grids in a Virtual Energy District

In the future Smart City, new information and communication technologies will enable a better management of the available resources. The Smart Grid infrastructure is emerging as a complex system where fine-grained monitoring and control of energy generating and/or consuming entities within the electricity network is possible. This will result to better approaches that will boost energy efficiency. To make real this vision, (open) platforms providing access to the smart meter data as well as potential management and value-added functionalities are needed. These will offer basic energy services that can be commonly used by application developers. In this context, this paper proposes a new market platform in order to coordinate the energy exchanges among several micro Smart Grids aggregated in a Virtual Energy District. Some numerical results in Matlab/Simulink environment are presented to validate the proposed platform.

Grid-interfacing active power filters to improve the power quality in a microgrid

This paper proposes the application of the strategy control approach used for the shunt active power filter previously proposed by the authors to the inverter interface of each single micro-sources present in a Microgrid. In particular the attention has been focused on the power quality and var supporting issues. The main advantage of the proposed strategy control approach lies on the fact that all sensitive loads connected to the Point of Common Coupling (PCC) are immunized from the power quality problems. Moreover, the proposed control approach requests only local information. The effectiveness of the proposed control strategy approach applied to a Microgrid is illustrated.

Management of storage systems in local electricity market to avoid renewable power curtailment in distribution network

The increase of small size generation systems may cause congestions, hitherto unexpected, on the distribution network. To reduce the impact of congestions, the use of storage systems is one of the main countermeasure. In the paper, a storage management strategy based on a local energy market is proposed, in order to maximize the utility of an users community in which local market takes place. The numerical results obtained and shown in the paper demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed management strategy2.

Reliability studies of a PV-WG hybrid system in presence of multi-micro storage systems

In the last years, distributed generation (DG) and microgrid (MG) technologies have been used to moderate the stress due to main stream utility grid electricity demand increase. The dispatch of renewable distributed energy sources at present is performed in such a way that, when implemented at very large scale, their intermittency can impact on the grids, what leads to concerns in terms of power quality and of reliability of supply. In this paper the attention is focused on MG reliability. On this subject the authors have proposed, in previous papers, opportune configuration schemes of MG constituted by a photovoltaic plant, a Wind plant and an Uninterruptible Power Supply. The goal of this paper is to evaluate the reliability improvements of load supply against network congestions adopting the proposed hybrid configurations in presence of storage systems for each energy source proposing an opportune operating strategy for the energy control system. In particular, the reliability estimation is performed in terms of the number of the critical loads interruptions and in particular of the charge state of storage systems, over a certain period of time by using the Monte Carlo simulation method.

Design of a grid-connected Photovoltaic system with grid ancillary services

Over the last decade, various reasons have determined a continuous increase of grid-connected photovoltaic systems due to need of supplying the world rise demand for electric power. This gave rise to problems concerning the stability and safety of the utility grid as well as power quality issues. It has drastically changed the way in which the grid-connected photovoltaic systems should interact with the grid. In this context the purpose of this paper it is proposed a control methodology using the active and reactive power control strategy proposed by the authors in a previous paper in order to provide ancillary services to the grid to safeguard the reliability, the stability and the power quality of the electrical system. The simulations has been carry-out using Matlab/Simulink environment, demonstrating that the proposed control methodology is able to provide grid ancillary services according to a grid interconnection standard.

Demand response program implementation in an energy district of domestic prosumers

During the last years the electricity supply chain (the production, consumption, distribution, storage and load management of electricity) has changed. In this contest a new term appears: the prosumer, that is a consumer and a producer of energy in the same entity. In the paper, a demand response program is proposed considering several prosumers combined into an Energy District connected through a central control entity: an aggregator. The goal of aggregator is to minimize the reverse energy flowing at the MV/LV substation minimizing the energy costs of the Energy district. The application on a Italian residential housing area is illustrated.

A Smartbox as a low-cost home automation solution for prosumers with a battery storage system in a demand response program

On the basis that a processing resource optimally calculates the loads scheduling one day-ahead for those prosumers operating in a demand response program, the question is: who acts the scheduling? This paper presents an electronic device named Smartbox as a low-cost and feasible home automation solution; so, given a processing resource which optimally calculates the loads scheduling one day-ahead, the mission of the Smartbox is receive and act the loads scheduling. The processing resource is in the cloud computing and it calculates the optimal scheduling through the solution of a prosumer problem so to minimizes the electricity bill; such a load scheduling is sent to the Smartbox via Internet. The Smartbox receives the load scheduling and hourly sends commands to local schedulable loads through an existing home automation system. In order to demonstrate the effectiveness and the feasibility of the proposed Smartbox, a prototype using an Arduino MEGA 2560 has been realized and tested in the laboratory. Such a prototype has been tested in combination with a) a software application consisting in a Java program which serves the user for input data, b) a prosumer problem solver consisting in a personal computer with Matlab and c) a demonstration panel which represents a private household equipped with a Schneider Electric - Konnex protocol home automation system. The laboratory test demonstrate that the Smartbox prototype is genuinely effective in implementing the load scheduling because duly and correctly the Smartbox manages the switching-on and off of schedulable loads.

The reliability evaluation of a power system in presence of photovoltaic and wind power generation plants and UPS

In this paper a system in which a photovoltaic plant (PV) and a mini Wind plant integrated in a Uninterruptible Power System (UPS) is presented. The aim is to reduce the critical loads loss due to long interruption of the main supply, using the power produced by renewable sources. Obviously the critical load loss depends on many stochastic variables: main supply interruptions, battery capacity and weather condition; so to evaluate the reliability of the system is not a easy task. In the paper, the attention is focused on the estimation of the evaluation of system reliability and its improvement respect to a conventional UPS. In particular, the reliability estimation is performed in terms of the number of the critical loads interruptions over a certain period of time by using the Monte Carlo simulation method.