VITO Smart Grids

A new paradigm for power networks

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The market share of sustainable and renewable energy production systems such as wind turbines and photovoltaic installations is becoming significant and will continue to grow in the coming decades. By nature, these new energy production systems are variable and decentralised, which calls for a fundamental rethinking of the energy transportation grid. In essence, the challenge we face is to match energy supply with energy demands both in time as well as geographically, a concept known as smart grid.

Time and location-based energy-matching with variable and decentralised production systems requires energy demand flexibility in combination with thermal and electrical storage.

Energy demand flexibility implies appliances that can shift their energy demand in time. For example, an electrical car has the flexibility to be charged overnight and not necessarily at the moment of plug-in. Also, many systems for heating or cooling have an energy demand flexibility that can be exploited for energy matching purposes. So these appliances allow to control the demand in function of time.

Thermal and electrical storage can be used to temporarily buffer excessive energy production and thereby control the offering in function of time. Batteries of electrical cars could be used to temporarily store excessive grid electricity and release this whenever the grid needs it.

While in the latter case we merely shift the supply of electricity over time, buffering can also be used to shift excessive offerings at one moment in time to reduced demands at another moment in time. When photovoltaic installations produce a lot of electricity during the summertime, and thereby exceed the electricity demand, one could choose to locally store the excessive electricity in the form of geothermal energy by means of a heat pump and recuperate this for heating purposes in the winter months, thereby reducing the electricity demand from the grid in winter to match the reduced electricity offering from photovoltaic installations during the winter months.

So, there are many ways to control both demand and offering over time. The challenge is to tune demand and offering in such a way that they match at every moment in time. VITO develops control systems for the active control of energy production, demand and storage to achieve that optimal balance. Such an energy-matching control system implies embedded software agents in the various appliances that communicate with a co-ordinator. This co-ordinator could be instantiated by means of multiple aggregators that operate at various levels within the network (home, neighbourhood, town, and so on) in a hierarchical and cascaded network architecture.

VITO has simulation tools to investigate the effectiveness of various control architectures and the intelligence of the embedded control algorithms. The results of VITO simulations can also be tested by means of an extensive smart grid testing infrastructure, whereby all energy production, storage and load appliances of the VITO facility are coupled to a realistic grid infrastructure and associated communication network.

For this smart grid research, the VITO team leverages years of experience in areas such as distributed production systems (wind turbines, photovoltaic installations, cogeneration, fuel cells, and so on), thermal storage (underground energy storage, phase change materials, and so on) and electrical storage (batteries, ultracaps, plug-in hybrid vehicles, and so on). The VITO team also works in close collaboration with key industry players to ensure that the technology innovation aligns with evolving economical business models and regulatory environments.

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