Winner
| Project Title: Coordinating Power Control Organization: Sustainable Innovation Country: Sweden Website: http://www.sust.se/en/projekt/coordinating-power-control/ Webinar PPT slides and recorded lecture: http://www.leonardo-energy.org/resources/1518/coordinating-power-control-5bfbcaa565d10 |
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The project “Coordinating Power Control” was founded on the belief that cooperative projects involving innovation hubs, the public, entrepreneurs, investors, and private companies can lead to smart, sustainable, and cost effective services using automation without the need for big behavioral changes.
The main project goal is to create a cost-effective optimization of a distribution grid north of Uppsala, Sweden consisting of about 14000 customers in mostly rural areas. The project brings together several IoT (internet of things) smart-grid service providers, associated regulatory bodies, and the local distribution service operator (DSO) to address technical, regulatory, and behavioral challenges and to bring together a community of market actors to provide time-forward optimization of power usage. To achieve the objective, the project employs 500 connected water-based heating systems to provide more than 1 MW of flexible electricity power, 60 sites with rooftop PV, connected and measured to provide 200 kW of electricity production, 36 kW of electric vehicle charging, and 80 kWh of batteries with 60 kW of instant power flexibility.
A key objective of the project was to find a balance between incentives and regulations through close cooperation between technology providers, regulatory bodies, and the DSO. To ensure that the project’s outcome provided a win-win scenario for customers, service providers and DSO, all resources are offered the opportunity to participate or opt out of the grid optimization activities and consumers participate based on their own criteria, such as comfort, ease of use, and/or energy savings. The effectiveness of alternative “bottom-up” business models is evaluated as part of the project, including a peer-to-peer solution based on a block chain sharing system.
Sustainable Innovation’s overall project is implemented with several current and planned projects designed to help companies integrate flexible options for their energy use of their smart technologies. These include: (1) New Collaborative Models designed to provide 1 MW of flexible power in a DSO distribution grid resulting in a commercial usage in the local grid along with several pilots in other grids; (2) Coordinating Power Control through combining batteries, EV charging, hydronic (water-based) heating and PV micro production into a single incentive by 2020; (3) New Energy Business Models in the Distribution Grid, An ERA-Net Smart grid funded project which tests different business models including block chain; and (4) Floor Heating as a Power Reserve, which has providers together with academia, investigating the potential of connected electric floor heating and how these can participate in the power management software, with final outcomes expected in 2018.
The project is expected to continue through 2020 and has already proven that flexible energy storage can be provided at around 40 Euros/kWh through the water based energy storage systems, compared to the utility price of 400 Euros/kWh for batteries. Sweden has over 3000 3.6 kW chargers in operation provided by at least 5 different providers, which is expected to increase within the next few years and have a dramatic effect on the grid. The project approach potentially impacts the 1.5 million Swedish houses that have water-based heating systems connected to electricity. These water-based systems could potentially provide well over 3 GW of flexible energy, with at least 5 GWh of energy storage without any changes in comfort. The first years’ results indicate that the participating customers are pleased with the energy savings and comfort in their homes. Future project work will combine project data with a model predictive control loop to optimize the grid even further, by using the logic as a base load controller rather than just for the peaks.
Since the time of the initial ISGAN award nomination submission, the “Coordinating Power Control” project has created a new continuous open test bed for local and international players to come and test novel ideas in real settings. So come and test new ideas on this unique platform, which is celebrating its 100th year in operation as a customer-owned grid this year.
