The Renewable Alternative Power System Simulator - RAPSim

An open simulation software for Micro Grids

It is not necessary to stress all the challenges that come allong with wide range integration of renewables into the power grid at this article. You easily find this somewhere else, in this blog or at another source in the web. But I want to focus your attention on a tool that can help to deal with this challenges and work torwards solutions. It is a lot on matching climate dependent production with the personal demand which is currently noticed only in average. The various influences on residential load profiles are diverse and include weather conditions, availability of other resources, personal habits and also social phenomenas. This variaty is a reason why Marija Ilic speaks of just-in-time and just-in-place services in the conntext of Smart Micro Grids. 

Developing of or researching on such services requires a flexible simulation tool with possibly high usability. This is exactly what RAPSim is aiming at. RAPSim has been developed at the Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt within the Lakeside Labs project Smart Microgrid and was presented in front of interested audience at the ISGT Asia - 2014 conference in Kuala Lumpur in May 2014. Since then the software project is downloadable for free at Sourceforge.net. 

Connected Smart Grid Objects 

The simulation field is a lattice where the user designs a scenario by placing different "grid objects", e.g., houses, wind turbines, PV panels, etc. Each of the objects can have a model which does all the inner-object calculations. Algorithms handle grid-wide interactions. User-defined models can extend  algorithms for the grid and/or models for the grid objects. RAPSim provides the interface with following functions:

• A graphical interface to create the intended scenarios and to control the simulator functions.
• Functions to save and load simulation scenarios in a generic xml format.
• A time thread that models time of day and day of the year and handles up to minute resolution.
• Generation of output files in csv-format. Object parameters can be selected to be written into a file at each time step.
• Weather simulation which can be done via stochastic models or simulated by measured data.
• Topological grid analysis that collects objects of the same bus in a list and aggregates their parameter values.
• Administration of algorithms for grid-wide calculations.
• Administration of object specific models that can be easily implemented by the user.

The software is written in Java and provided with the source code so that it can be imported into a Java IDE such as eclipse. The development of the software is still ongoing. Try it out and give us feedback by adding a comment or sending a ticket to helps us to further improve it. Please spread the news about the tool, while we will do the best on our part so that onces RAPSim may become a synonym for rapid simulation in the field of mirco grids.
Once more here the link to the sourceforge page.

Publications on RAPSim (with links to fulltext PDF):

M. Pöchacker, T. Khatib, and W. Elmenreich. The microgrid simulation tool RAPSim: Description and case study. In Proceedings of the IEEE Innovative Smart Grid Technologies Asia (ISGT-ASIA'14), Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, 2014. IEEE.

 

Workshop on Human Centered Energy Management

1st Interdisciplinary Workshop on Human Centered Energy Management
to be held from 7th to 11th of July 2014
at Lakeside Science & Technology Park, Klagenfurt, Austria.

An inter-faculty research field “Energy Management and Energy Technologies”, staffed by academics from a wide range of disciplines, has recently been established at the Alpen-Adria University Klagenfurt (AAU Klagenfurt). Research efforts focus on energy management and energy innovation, networked and de- central energy systems. Together with the Faculty of Technical Sciences (TeWi), the Faculty for Management and Economics (WiWi) and the Faculty of Interdisciplinary Studies (IFF), this new research area will be further developed in cooperation with external partners such as the Lakeside Park.







The Lakeside Park is a platform for cooperation between enterprises and university institutions in the information and communication technology (ICT) sectors. A place of interdisciplinary research and development, training, production and services. The focus of the Lakeside Park is on selected topics of information and communication technology and complementary technologies such as energy systems. In the Interreg IV projects “Smart Energy” and “Efficient, Effective, Smart” the Lakeside Park establishes inter-regional contacts to strengthen collaborative research and development. Therefore, the Lakeside Park and the AAU introduce this novel interdisciplinary workshop with focus on “Human Centered Energy Management”.

Lakeside Park Klagenfurt with a view to the Wörthersee

Human Centered Energy Management

To ensure an efficient production, supply and consumption of energy, it is necessary to introduce novel technologies. Energy monitoring units, new smart control and managing techniques shall improve energy efficiency in the smallest entities of the common power grid – the Smart Building with its inhabitants and its neighborhood. In that respect the individual human being plays a crucial role for energy management tasks. On the one hand it is necessary to improve the energy efficiency of the costumer’s home to reduce energy consumption and costs. On the other hand also the decrease of environmental pollution by optimal utilization of energy resources is a major task of future energy systems.

The proposed workshop “Human Centered Energy Management” takes up these tasks and tries to identify problems and solutions for human centered energy management tasks in an interdisciplinary manner.

Format and Objectives

The aim of the workshop is to give regional experts, such as local professors and young researchers of the AAU, the opportunity to discuss and elaborate ideas with world-wide experts and to introduce and to discuss further ideas in an interdisciplinary setup. Therefore, participants with academic backgrounds and an interest on novel smart energy management systems as well as companies and research institutes are welcome to present and to discuss their research tasks and ideas.

The workshop will have a dedicated “industry day” providing the companies a platform to introduce their problems and to elaborate possible solutions and ideas with experts in the field of energy systems from different disciplines. The general format of the workshop lasts one week with key-speaker inputs and group work with discussions and presentations. Therefore, the event provides an excellent platform for scientific exchange, networking, establishment of international collaboration and the initiation of joint research projects.

Addressed Topics:

• ICT solutions and approaches for smart home management and systems for integrated energy management.
• Integration of smart and legacy appliances, renewable energy sources and storage systems in buildings to improve energy efficiency and awareness of inhabitants.
• Identification, modeling and simulation of energy systems and human behavior
• Energy data analysis and feedback approaches and behavior influencing information systems
• Economics and law aspects of human centered energy managements systems in respect to smart homes, smart metering and energy data analysis as well as for renewable energy production and storage systems.
• Market and business models for ICT-based energy services designed to improve the recent power grid and homes.

For more information about the workshop and how it is possible to participate, please contact dominik.egarter@aau.at.

Modeling Solar Radiation

In our tutorial at the 2014 IEEE Innovative Smart Grid Technologies - Asia conference, Tamer Khatib and I covered the application of machine learning techniques for energy applications, in particular for modeling solar radiation. In the first part we explored meta-heuristic search algorithms and envisioned their application for designing distributed, self-organizing control systems using evolutionary algorithms. We provide an open-source software tool, FREVO, to conveniently apply this approach of finding the proper configuration of a local agent.

In the second part, we targeted the problem of solar radiation modeling. After stepping through different classical modeling approaches, we presented the possibility of using artificial neural networks to learn the correlation of input parameters such as latitude, longitude, temperature, humidity, month, day, hour to predict global and diffuse solar radiation. Experiments show that this method can achieve a high accuracy compared to existing models.

Links:

• Download FREVO (open source, platform-independent)
• Video: 6 minute introduction to FREVO
• A. Sobe, I. Fehérvári, and W. Elmenreich. FREVO: A tool for evolving and evaluating self-organizing systems. In Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Evaluation for Self-Adaptive and Self-Organizing Systems, Lyon, France, September 2012.
• I. Fehervari and W. Elmenreich. Evolution as a tool to design self-organizing systems. In Self-Organizing Systems, volume LNCS 8221, pages 139–144. Springer Verlag, 2014.
• T. Khatib, A Mohamed, K Sopian. A review of solar energy modeling techniques. J. of Renewable & Sustainable Energy Reviews. 2012.16(5): 2864-2869.
• T. Khatib, A. Mohamed, K. Sopian, M. Mahmoud. Assessment of Artificial Neural Networks for Hourly Solar Radiation Prediction. J. of Photoenergy. 2012. 2012(ID 946890):1-7.
• IEEE Innovative Smart Grid Technologies - Asia conference site

Is fusion power an option?

In his TED talk plasma physicist Michel Laberge talks about the state of the art of energy production by nuclear fusion and presents an idea for a new type of nuclear reactor that could produce cheap energy.


There are two types of energy production by nuclear power, fusion and fission. All current productive nuclear power plants are based on the fission technology, which comes with the risk of thermal runaway meltdown and lots of health risks from nuclear waste.
The other type, fusion, is worth a look though. Currently there are no fusion power plants that gain more energy than is used for running the process. However, since fusion processes only take place under high temperatures, a fusion process would stop under a breach of the containment field which makes it less dangerous than fission - at least if you are not in the immediate vicinity of the reactor when this happens. Fusion power will also produce more short-term radioactive material, which will be dangerous for "only" 300 years. In contrast, current nuclear fission power plants produce material that is active for thousands of years.
Still too dangerous? Then let's have the fusion reactor installed 150 million kilometers away in space. It's called the sun.

Energiewende - the Game

"Energiewende" is a computer game about the transition of our energy system from fossil fuels to renewable and sustainable energy sources. The game was developed by Manuel Herold, Matija Kucko, Andrea Monacchi, John N. A. Brown, and Wilfried Elmenreich as contribution to the CROSMOS GameJam. At this event teams had to develop a computer game to a topic just revealed at the contest in just two days - 2014 the topic was related to the services of Stadtwerke Klagenfurt. 

The game Energiewende let's you try out the strategic and tactical aspects of an electrical energy system that is mostly powered by renewable energy sources. Unlike a coal power plant, photovoltaic or wind power plants cannot save fuel in times of low load for using it later. Therefore, it is necessary to plan the distribution and placement of power plants well according to the expected power demands of their users - in the game they are modeled as houses with an energy consumption behavior of typical households. After placing power plants and transmission lines, the game features a real-time mode, where your system is simulated throughout three phases of a day (night/morning, daytime, evening). In case there is not enough energy in one phase, you must prevent a blackout (otherwise you loose the game) by balancing the grid. This is done by turning off devices in the houses. But be aware - user might not like this, especially if you turn off a device the user was about to use right now. A "complain-o-meter" is showing the aggregated dislikings of the users - once the complain-o-meter runs over, the game is lost.
Thus, one learns also about the typical consumption of devices and their potential for balancing the grid. The method shown in the game called demand response is currently a frequently discussed method for the future smart grid.

Got everything? Try out the game by clicking the image above. Have fun!

Call for Papers IEEE SmartGridComm 2014

IEEE SmartGridComm 2014 - IEEE International Conference on Smart Grid Communications
Venice, Italy, November 3-6, 2014
http://sgc2014.ieee-smartgridcomm.org

============================================================================
CALL for SPECIAL SESSION PROPOSALS: Deadline March 2, 2014
CALL for PAPERS: Deadline April 20, 2014
============================================================================

The IEEE International Conference on Smart Grid Communications (SmartGridComm) 2014 will be held in Venice, Italy, at the Hilton Molino Stucky Hotel on  November 3-6, 2014. The program will include workshops, technical sessions, keynote talks from industrial leaders and renowned academics, panel discussions, and expositions. It will be centered on all aspects of smart grid communications covered by the symposia:

1. Communications and Networks to Enable the Smart Grid
2. Cyber Security and Privacy
3. Architectures, Control and Operation for Smart Grids, Microgrids and Distributed Resources
4. Demand Response and Dynamic Pricing
5. Data Management and Grid Analytics

Thematic Workshops will be held on November 3, 2014.

The program will be completed with a number of social events that will allow the participants to enjoy exclusive networking opportunities and the beauty of the marvelous historical city of Venice.

CALL for SPECIAL SESSION PROPOSALS

The conference will include special sessions on highly specialized topics reporting technical trends and breakthroughs within the scope of IEEE SmartGridComm 2014. Special sessions will be part of each symposium technical program. Special sessions are organized at the initiative of one or more individuals, who must adhere to the procedures published in the Call for Special Sessions.

Important Dates

Deadline for special session proposal: March 2, 2014
Notification of proposal acceptance: March 9, 2014
Submission deadline for special session papers: April 20, 2014
Final notification of session and papers acceptance: July 12, 2014
Camera ready paper submission: August 4, 2014
Author registration: August 4, 2014


CALL for PAPERS

Prospective authors are invited to submit original contributions (standard two column IEEE format, up to six pages) on all aspects of smart grid communications covered by the five conference symposia. Submission guidelines can be found in the Call for Papers.

Important Dates

Paper submission deadline: April 20, 2014
Notification of acceptance: July 12, 2014
Camera ready paper due: August 4, 2014
Author registration deadline: August 4, 2014

Wind power or photovoltaics?

Wind power is an interesting option for producing renewable energy. In contrast to Photovoltaics, wind generated energy costs less but it requires transmission infracstructure between wind parks and the consumers.Germany has more than 32 GW of installed wind power capacity and is now building transmission lines to transport the energy to the south.

How predictable is wind in comparison to PV output? The yield of both depend on some meterological factors which are hard to predict. However there is one big difference: you can easily calculate the maximum amount of solar intensity that your PV system has to cope with. With wind speed, it is hard to define a maximum possible wind speed, since on rare occasions wind speed can be significantly higher than the expected value.

Which could be dangerous: If the generator spins faster and faster, large forces produced could cause a wind turbine to self destruct:

Luckily, todays wind turbines have an overspeed control (a braking or featherin mechanism) and a cut-out mode. Still, I don't want them in my garden :-)