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Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - GOFLEX (Generalized Operational FLEXibility for Integrating Renewables in the Distribution Grid)

Teaser

Summary

GOFLEX is a research and innovation project funded by the European Commission to make renewable energy more competitive. The European Union embraces the Paris Agreement on climate change by pledging to increase the share of renewable energy in Europe from 17% in 2016 to 27% by 2030. Reaching this goal requires accommodating more energy from intermittent renewable sources using existing physical infrastructure. Shifting toward renewables is technically challenging and expensive because todayâ€™s load patterns differ from todayâ€™s renewable generation patterns. Most people are not accustomed to or equipped for varying their energy usage based on how much the wind blows or the sun shines. One exception may be owners of solar panels or other energy resources scattered across the distribution grid. However, during periods of high sunshine these resources can create excess generation and overwhelm existing distribution grids designed for one-way flow of electricity. At present, the entities responsible for ensuring the safe and reliable operation of the grid, known as distribution system operators (DSOs), often intervene manually for lack of other choices to rectify undesirable conditions. GOFLEX changes this picture by introducing an innovative suite of technologies to automatically manage energy resources at the local level.

The GOFLEX suite of technologies manages energy production and consumption at the local level, from the bottom up. In so doing, the project invites consumers to participate actively in energy markets by offering---on a voluntary, consensual, remunerative, and automatic basis---to be flexible in their energy production and/or consumption. This flexibility, also known as demand-response, can help balance electricity supply with demand. By taking a bottom-up approach, GOFLEX aims at making demand-response more cost-effective and increasing the level of demand-response available. We seek this increase by introducing dynamic prices for and automatic trading of demand-response capacity. The possibility for automatic trading, including aggregating smaller amounts of demand-response, enables energy storage in physical processes such as heating and cooling. These processes can thus become virtual storage reservoirs. Managing flexible loads with a view to grid conditions requires systems capable of optimizing for local or grid-level conditions. Finally, DSOs need improved observability and manageability of the distribution grid to use demand-response in an optimal way. Improving observability requires grid and weather forecast data along with energy market data. GOFLEX aims to develop and demonstrate this vision of an innovative, automatic, and flexible bottom-up energy system.

Work performed

The work carried out during the first half of the three-year project has focused on creating a technological solution to manage energy flexibility, planning to demonstrate the solution in three European countries, and analysing business opportunities for energy flexibility in the demonstration locations and the wider European market. From a technological perspective, GOFLEX has demonstrated an integrated system of hardware and software for the automatic extraction, aggregation and trading of energy flexibility in the controlled environment of a factory acceptance test ready to be delivered to the field. Achieving this milestone required successful phases of defining requirements and developing and integrating prototypes. Planning to deliver and demonstrate the integrated solution at locations in Cyprus, Switzerland, and Germany required efforts to identify, recruit, and describe prosumers for participation in the project. Identifying and describing prosumers considered as typical or representative for a demonstration location has been especially important so that requirements for such prosumers can be incorporated into the development process. In terms of business models and business cases for energy flexibility, our analysis found that several business models may be feasible, depending on the strategy of the local distribution system operator. For example, the availability of an energy flexibility technology may allow the DSO to provide new services to form new customer relationships, to reduce their costs for balancing energy, or to shift the balance between fixed and variable costs (contribution margin) in the distribution grid at the utility. In sum, based on the first half of the project GOFLEX is on track to meet its objectives.

Final results

Several elements of GOFLEX activity show progress beyond the state of the art. Developments in automatic extraction, aggregation, and trading of flexibility along with improved distribution observability represent new contributions beyond current capability. For automatic aggregation and trading, the ambition is to integrate the technology of energy trading for a variety of prosumer types. Automatic trading requires advances across involved technologies ranging from extracting flexibility based on usage patterns to optimizing where to apply flexibility considering cost and benefit. This line of work is based on the ground-breaking concept of Flex Offers which gives a general and scalable way of capturing and managing energy flexibility. In distribution observability, a new machine-learning approach is proposed to overcome the limited availability of grid topology data and the typical sparseness of sensor data at the demonstration sites. These advances contribute to the suite of technologies needed to adapt energy loads and incorporate more renewables.

The contributions GOFLEX makes to the state of the art should create socio-economic impact and wider societal implications in the form of a transformed energy market where final consumers play an active part. One impact GOFLEX is already having is to make people think differently about the energy system: bottom-up instead of top-down. This change in thinking is driven by 11 scientific publications and 17 events in the first half of the project. Looking ahead, using GOFLEX, the consumption and generation patterns of end-users become better aligned with energy prices and therefore more cost-effective. Technologies for automatic home energy management systems also improve final consumer understanding of their own energy consumption, highlighting waste and inefficient behaviours. Furthermore, distribution system operators gain real-time trading of load flexibility and improve observability of energy demand, generation, and flexibility at a local level. Aggregators can bring together various sources of load flexibility to compose the desired portfolio of grid-service offerings. Taken together these advances can transform the markets for generation, delivery, and consumption of energy.