Koen Kok

Mitigation of wind power fluctuations by intelligent response of demand and distributed generation

With the world becoming ever more conscious of the necessity for clean, sustainable energy sources, an increased proportion of energy produced by wind resources is expected. In the current power system, the integration of such large capacity of non-load-following and intermittent supply leads to several challenges, one of which is to control the balance between demand and supply. A large - not yet utilized - source that may provide flexibility to contribute to this balance is available at the household level.

Monitoring and Control for Energy Efficiency in the Smart House

The high heterogeneity in smart house infrastructures as well as in the smart grid poses several challenges when it comes into developing approaches for energy efficiency. Consequently, several monitoring and control approaches are underway, and although they share the common goal of optimizing energy usage, they are fundamentally different at design and operational level. Therefore, we consider of high importance to investigate if they can be integrated and, more importantly, we provide common services to emerging enterprise applications that seek to hide the existing heterogeneity. We present here our motivation and efforts in bringing together the PowerMatcher, BEMI and the Magic system.

Smart Houses in the Smart Grid: Developing an interactive network.

Private households constitute a considerable share of Europes electricity consumption. The current electricity distribution system treats them as effectively passive individual units. In the future, however, users of the electricity grid will be involved more actively in the grid operation and can become part of intelligent networked collaborations. They can then contribute the demand and supply flexibility that they dispose of and, as a result, help to better integrate renewable energy in-feed into the distribution grids.

Quantifying flexibility for smart grid services

Renewable energy sources and other types of distributed generation are becoming ever more present in todays power supply mix. In addition, a change in electric load is being seen with the increase in electric heating and electric vehicles. These additions may create a number of challenges in the current electrical grid. At DSO level problems in substation congestion and voltage and frequency instability can be seen, as well at TSO level imbalances due to fluctuations in supply (e.g. wind power). One way of handling these added complexities is to utilize the flexibility in consumption and production that is available in the power grid. There are many types of currently unused flexibility. In this paper we consider one of the largest types of available flexibility with small devices at the distribution level, the thermal buffer in combination with electric heat pumps or combined heat and power units. A major obstacle in utilizing such flexibility is the inability to estimate at the DSO or TSO level the amount of power which can be ramped up and down as well as how long it can be sustained. In this paper we demonstrate how these characteristics can be estimated by creating quantifying formulas. Further, we validate these equations with a number of scenarios using thermal electric devices which are modeled based on currently installed, real world installations. These characteristics indeed can be accurately estimated given that some specifics of the systems available are known. Finally we discuss the benefits to different stakeholders of such knowledge.

INTEGRAL: ICT-Platform Based Distributed Control in Electricity Grids with a Large Share of Distributed Energy Resources and Renewable Energy Sources

The European project INTEGRAL aims to build and demonstrate an industry-quality reference solution for DER aggregation-level control and coordination, based on commonly available ICT components, standards, and platforms. To achieve this, the Integrated ICT-platform based Distributed Control (IIDC) is introduced. The project includes also three field test site installations in the Netherlands, Spain and France, covering normal, critical and emergency grid conditions.

Architectures for novel energy infrastructures: Multi-agent based coordination patterns

Due to the increased proportion of small renewable energy sources in a distributed setting (DG-RES), active control of small distributed energy producing and consuming systems will play an important role in future electricity grids [1]. These distributed energy resources have production patterns, which are either partially stochastic (e.g. wind, solar cells) or are coupled to the primary user process (e.g. co-generation of heat and electricity). Furthermore, on the demand-side, and increasingly on the electricity storage side, opportunities exist for actively serving stability applications in the grid by real-time supply/demand coordination. In the future, an information and communication layer for grid coordination could serve a portfolio of ICT-applications on timescales running from seconds to hours. To get a grip on these (r)evolutionary developments, possibly toppling the electricity grid, in this paper, architecture requirements for future high proportion DG-RES electricity grids are collected from a Power Electronics System point of view as well as from an ICT point of view using an inventory of business models in the power grid that focus on coordination of multiple small-scale DG-RES resources. Modeled from an ICT point-of-view, these give rise to architectures for applications that can successively be implemented in hardware and software as active components in the distribution grid. A number of possible grid control strategy coordination patterns (GCPs), which are defined in a generic, reusable manner, can be seen to emerge. GCPs, connected and intertwined to one another on several layers (physical, commercial) of the grid, together, can provide the framework for coordination in the overall intelligent grid. Bottom-up approaches of implementing coordination in future active grids appear to be the method of choice to use in implementing the GCPs. Software agents [2], [3] coordinating primary processes using market algorithms, as implemented in the PowerMatcher approach [3]-[4], appear to be very suited for this.

Field Trials towards Integrating Smart Houses with the Smart Grid

Treating homes, offices and commercial buildings as intelligently networked collaborations can contribute to enhancing the efficient use of energy. When smart houses are able to communicate, interact and negotiate with both customers and energy devices in the local grid, the energy consumption can be better adapted to the available energy supply, especially when the proportion of variable renewable generation is high. Several efforts focus on integrating the smart houses and the emerging smart grids. We consider that a highly heterogeneous infrastructure will be in place and no one-size-fits-all solution will prevail. Therefore, we present here our efforts focusing not only on designing a framework that will enable the gluing of various approaches via a service-enabled architecture, but also discuss on the trials of these.