The Role of Smart Energy System in Future

Climate change's increasingly obvious impacts need a radical shift in the direction of renewable energy sources in the energy sector.

FREMONT, CA: The increasingly obvious repercussions of climate change demand a dramatic shift away from fossil fuels and toward renewable energy sources. While the Fukushima disaster prompted a particularly significant shift in German energy policies that gave rise to the so-called Energiewende, or energy transition, the global trend toward renewables is evident.  The energy transition's significant obstacles have made it imperative for the computer science community to contribute in order to ensure supply security and stability, notably for the electric power grid. The upshot is that the extremely interdisciplinary and dynamic field of research and development is now being addressed by the new discipline of energy informatics. While there are many challenging aspects of the energy transition, there are four significant problem areas that highlight the urgent need for contributions from the energy informatics community.

Volatility

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In the energy system of the future, electricity will be produced mostly by photovoltaic panels on rooftops and in bigger field installations, as well as onshore and offshore wind power stations. This energy source is fundamentally unstable and only partially within control because it is weather-dependent. The conventional wisdom "supply follows demand" no longer applies, and instead needs to follow the supply with the demand, which calls on the demand side to develop sufficient flexibility and adaptability.

Uncertainty

Energy supply and demand projections have gotten much harder, in addition to renewable energy sources' increasing intermittent nature. Beyond the weather-dependent supply unpredictability, consumer behaviour is evolving and no longer necessarily reflects typical load profiles due to the use of innovative applications like heat pumps and electric vehicles, as well as demand-side management in response to time-dependent pricing. As a result, to respond more quickly and dynamically to observed deviations from expected energy schedules, the operators of the transition and distribution systems as well as the parties responsible for balancing need more information about the actual behaviour of end users and their actual energy schedules.

Decentralisation

In contrast to today's power grids, which generate electricity at a few large power plants, feed it into the grid at the highest voltage level, transmit it over great distances, and then distribute it locally to the end user's low voltage connection points, tomorrow's power grids will produce electricity at millions of low voltage locations, where it will either be consumed immediately or fed into the grid, which will then need to gather and (re)distribute the energy. Local power in-feed might cause congestion because of inadequate cable capacity, which raises voltage. The advent of significant additional loads from electric vehicle battery recharging could have the opposite impact. Even though distribution system operators (DSOs) have remote access to information on the status of their substations, both effects are scarcely noticeable to them. The rapid departure of large power plants as the traditional providers of ancillary energy system services is another effect of the move from centralised to decentralised power generation, and it again raises the necessity for flexibility in decentralised energy schedules.

The Power System Changes its Dynamic Properties

Traditionally, electromechanical systems have been used to control power systems. Instead of being a traditional grid built around massive power plants, a grid controlled by power electronics is more of a software-defined system that is capable of dynamic response much faster. We, therefore, require quicker control responses and cleverer IT solutions. The availability of data on the state of all operational components of the electrical grid is a requirement for dealing with these serious issues, demonstrating the necessity of digitization. However, in the future grid, the DSOs and even the energy managers of facilities, buildings, and homes will have to respond locally to such quality problems, primarily concerning voltage, but to some extent even in response to frequency deviations, as long as they are part of aggregated service providers. In the traditional power grid, the transmission system operators (TSOs) were responsible for dealing with stability problems of frequency and voltage. As a result, a network of energy information and control points with dispersed system intelligence is essential, as are several sites from which suitable control decisions can be made, often using data that is already in the area.

Consequences

Discovering and taking advantage of the flexibility of load plans connected to demand and supply is required to deal with the inherent volatility, uncertainty, and decentralisation of energy supply from renewable sources. Only data analysis and interaction with organisations in charge of running relevant equipment, such as (smart) houses and buildings, industrial operations, and those pertaining to the energy needs of electric vehicles, will be able to do this. It is a problem for the computer science community to supply the requisite properly designed procedures and tools. This highlights the need for a collaborative interdisciplinary effort of computer scientists, power engineers, and control engineers as informatics responsibilities are expanded beyond information and communication technologies to operational technologies and even real-time control. In this highly regulated critical infrastructure, they must take into account important economic and regulatory challenges in addition to technical ones.