The Siemens Smart Energy use case aims at contributing to the stability of the future power grid.
The approach relies on a crowd-based aggregation and usage of so-called flexibilities. Flexibilities are intended deviations from actual consumption or production of electrical power at a specific time andcan be used to compensate imbalances in the power grid. The IoTCrawler is used to discover, aggregate and rank flexibility offers from a high number of small households or small commercial energy systems.
A simulation framework
In order to allow IoTCrawler to negotiate with the many respective assets like photovoltaic systems, home energy storages, heat pumps, electric vehicles charging stations, a lot of effort goes into providing the necessary interfaces. Because these interfaces are not broadly available and likely will not be for the remaining project runtime, a simulation framework for flexible low voltage grid assets has been developed, so Siemens are able to show the feasibility of the concept in the desired large scale (we are talking about a magnitude of thousands of assets). It allows them to virtually deploy energy management systems for the different asset types at an arbitrary scale – realised by containerisation – and provides free configuration and randomisation of the flexibility behaviour. This will act as a supplement to the intended prototypical integration of one building’s energy management system.
The overall prototype architecture
The resulting hybrid demonstrator approach – using simulated assets, but also one real building – will allow Siemens to show the technical feasibility of the concept, and also the ability to operate on a large scale. The architecture is presented in the figure shown above. Starting from the top the operator enters the workflow around the flexible assets via the designated web UI, orchestration of subcomponents, monitoring and rating of discovered flexibilities takes place and at the bottom, brokers interfacing simulated assets from different domains are shown. These are in turn integrated in a federated architecture assuring the required scalability.