RT23 | Incremental prototyping approach of control solutions for Local Energy Communities

Local Energy Communities (LEC) have been recognized by the European Union (EU) as a key component of the energy transition. To maintain an efficient, sustainable, and stable energy supply, the integration of different infrastructures such as the electricity, gas, and heat sector and the fluctuating availability of energy pose complex challenges to both, the European energy system as well as the local energy systems. These challenges can be met by finding new ways to link the various energy paths and processes using intelligent information and communications technology (ICT) platforms, extensive monitoring, advanced control tools, and sophisticated end-to-end data processing. Thus, for future LECs, it is necessary to provide the intelligence required to manage a multi-energy system at the district level and to link between local energy district systems and the overlaying systems. In this framework, living labs constitute an interesting testbed where fundamental research for the integration of sustainable energy technologies into real systems can be carried on. At Forschungszentrum Jülich (FZJ) we developed the Living Lab Energy Campus (LLEC) which integrates several energy demonstrators for generating and storing energy, extensive building automation, and ICT infrastructure, into the existing campus. The resulting infrastructure forms an ideal testbed for future multi-modal district energy systems with a high share of intermittent renewable energies. Among others, these include a low-temperature district heating (LTDH) system that uses the waste heat of the local supercomputer with associated heat pumps, several photovoltaic installations, two large battery storage solutions and several vehicle-to-grid (V2G) capable cars and charging stations. The development and testing of an ICT platform, and of the associated algorithms, for the operation of such a LEC is an involving and time-consuming task. In particular, it is important to follow an incremental prototyping approach before the complexity of the platform becomes overwhelming and makes the testing unfeasible in a reasonable time. For this purpose, we defined a three steps approach for the testing and validation of the algorithms and ICT platform developed by our institute, Institute of Energy and Climate Research Energy Systems Engineering (IEK-10) at FZJ. This approach allows us to move agile from early-stage testing of control and scheduling approaches to full field testing of completed ICT solutions embedding the developed control approaches. The three major steps are: - Simulation testing, to preliminary evaluate the performance of scheduling and control algorithms. - Hardware-in-the-loop testing, to evaluate the control approaches using software and hardware implementation equal to the one that will be implemented for the field deployment. - Field testing, where the developed control solutions are deployed in the field for final testing. During the presentation, these three main steps aimed at testing new control solutions will be discussed, highlighting the limitations and benefits. Then, the infrastructure used to implement them will be described. Finally, some examples of how the infrastructure is used will be presented.