Richard Kuntschke

Scalability of Smart Grid Protocols: Protocols and Their Simulative Evaluation for Massively Distributed DERs

Today, the whole energy sector is going to enter a phase of far-reaching revolution. The legacy power generation and transmission concept is converting to a massively distributed energy generation landscape integrating an extensive number of variable and small renewable energy resources such as biomass or PV installations with all their challenging effects on the energy grid. New stakeholders (e.g. energy resource aggregators), more flexibility for the consumers (energy market place), and totally new concepts (loading of e-Cars, usage of e-Cars as flexible power storage) have to be respected. Innovative monitoring and control concepts are required to operate these distributed energy resources in a reliable and safe way. This paper describes the principles for an efficient management of a massively distributed energy system based on small and variable energy resources. For evaluation purposes of this approach a newly developed coupled energy grid communication network simulator is introduced with which large scale aspects of the new ICT management frame¬works can be studied in a smart grid environment.

Economic optimization in Virtual Power Plants vs. stable grid operation—bridging the gap

In nowadays Smart Grids, economic optimizations performed by Virtual Power Plants (VPPs) may interfere with stable grid operation required by Distribution System Operators (DSOs). Since Smart Grids and VPPs are important building blocks of future energy systems, bridging the gap between economic optimization performed by VPPs and stable grid operation required by DSOs is an important task. In this paper, we present a fundamental system architecture and a concept enabling VPPs and DSOs to negotiate their positions to satisfy the needs and requirements of both sides. Thus, instead of being a potential interference factor, economically sensible operation of distributed energy resources (DERs) organized in VPPs and stable grid operation as required by DSOs are integrated in a common solution.

Grid-aware VPP operation

The notion of Smart Grids entails the vision that energy grids handling one-way flows of energy evolve into Smart Grids dealing with multi-directional flows of energy and digital information. Numerous projects have already dealt with solving the resulting complexity and proposed several new, integrated approaches to delivering suitable information technology and operational technology solutions. However, most of those solutions took a certain perspective, such as the perspective of the technical grid operation, the perspective of the energy market, or the perspective of participating plants. Instead of only taking one of those perspectives into account, we capture a holistic view including all involved parties and introduce a Smart Grid approach that combines technical as well as economical aspects, thus bringing the different parties together. This approach results in improved economic optimization results while adhering to grid constraints, thus ensuring stable grid operation. We started validating the proposed approach in a field trial and we present first results.

Leveraging Efficient XML Interchange (EXI) for Filter-Enabled Data Dissemination in Embedded Networks

Due to its flexibility and extensive tool support, XML is an obvious choice for a generic data exchange format. However, the verbosity and processing overhead of textual XML impedes its use in resource-restricted embedded networks. These disadvantages have been addressed by the introduction of binary representations of the XML Infoset such as W3C’s Efficient XML Interchange (EXI) format. EXI can be used to significantly reduce message size and processing overhead for XML-based messaging. In this paper, we show how to leverage EXI for filter-enabled binary XML dissemination in embedded networks. The approach further reduces resource consumption by sharing common data and processing results among a set of multiple queries. Thus, through the suitable placement of pre- and post-filters on binary XML data, bandwidth on network connections and computational resources on nodes can be saved. Consequently, more data can be processed with a certain amount of available resources within an embedded network.

Application and Evaluation in the Energy Domain

Energy providers in Germany, including grid operators, play an essential role in securing the value chain of almost all business sectors as well as supplying private households with energy.