Ute Vogel

Supporting Renewable Power Supply Through Distributed Coordination of Energy Resources

Renewable Energy Sources (RES) are considered a solution for a sustainable power supply. But integrating these decentralized power sources into the current power grid designed for a centralized power supply is a challenging task. We suggest distributed, agent-based and self-organized control algorithms for distributed units in a “Smart Grid” as a promising but challenging solution. Dynamical Virtual Power Plants (DVPP) are introduced as a first prototype of distributed controlled components of a Smart Grid. Tools and methods for a comprehensive evaluation of such new Smart Grid control methods in terms of technological indicators as well as sustainability indicators will be the next challenge in research and development for computer scientists in this domain.

Optimization of Adaptive Consumers to a Time-varying Electricity Supply

A mayor challenge for the integration of renewable energy sources to the existing power supply system is to provide environment-friendly balance energy which compensates temporal fluctuations in the power supply of wind mills or photovoltaics. In this paper, we analyze a centralized approach for demand side management reducing the need for balance energy. The approach assumes a given set of energy consuming jobs that are freely movable within job-specific pre-defined time intervals. Using the meta-heuristics Tabu Search, a schedule of these jobs is searched that leads to an optimal match of energy demand with energy supply. Different initialization strategies for constructing an initial solution and different alternatives of Tabu Search are evaluated in order to enhance the optimization result. Using realistic data for wind power and synthesized but not unrealistic sets of up to 120,000 jobs, the optimization results show that a considerable reduction of balance energy could be possible by our load shifting method.

Advances and New Trends in Environmental and Energy Informatics

This book presents the latest findings and ongoing research in the field of green information systems and green information and communication technology (ICT). It provides insights into a whole range of cross-cutting topics in ICT and environmental sciences as well as showcases how information and communication technologies allow environmental and energy efficiency issues to be handled effectively. The papers presented in this book are a selection of extended and improved contributions to the 28th International Conference on Informatics for Environmental Protection dedicated to ICT for energy efficiency. This book is essential and particularly worth reading for those who already gained basic knowledge and want to deepen and extend their expertise in the subjects mentioned above.