Advancing the Industrial Sectors Participation in Demand Response within National Electricity Grids

Increasing the level and diversifying the sources of flexible capacity available to transmission system operators will be a pivotal factor for maintaining reliable control of national electricity grids. These response capacities are widely available; however, one area with large capacities that could benefit from advancements is the industrial sector. This sector’s highly regulated nature ensures that structured procedures and thorough investigations are required to implement significant change. This study presents a systematic methodology to effectively categorise assets and evaluate their perceived risk of participation in demand response, allowing industries to present a sustainable portfolio of flexible capacity to the grid. Following implementation on an internationally relevant industrial site, this methodology identified several assets for participation, determining that it is realistic to expect 35 to 75 kW of flexible capacity from only air handling units on a single site. A selected unit was further evaluated using an internal air-temperature modelling tool. This demonstrated its ability to respond safely to the actual 2019 and 2020 grid frequency events and even remain off, at no risk to the indoor thermal environment for at least 20 min in each case. The potential impact of advancing industrial participation is presented, with the highest scenario providing almost 15 MW of flexible capacity to the Irish national grid. The financial benefit achievable on a site from the most conservative assets was found to be between EUR 993 and EUR 2129 annually for a single response category and up to EUR 6563 based on payment multipliers. Overall, this research demonstrates the significant flexible capacities available within the industrial sector and illustrates the low-risk capabilities and considerable benefits achievable on a single site and for the wider national electricity grids with this concept.

A Thermal Discomfort Index for Demand Response Control in Residential Water Heaters

Demand-response techniques are crucial for providing a proper quality of service under the paradigm of smart electricity grids. However, control strategies may perturb and cause discomfort to clients. This article proposes a methodology for defining an index to estimate the discomfort associated with an active demand management consisting of the interruption of domestic electric water heaters. Methods are applied to build the index include pattern detection for estimating the water utilization using an Extra Trees ensemble learning method and a linear model for water temperature, both based on analysis of real data. In turn, Monte Carlo simulations are applied to calculate the defined index. The proposed approach is evaluated over one real scenario and two simulated scenarios to validate that the thermal discomfort index correctly models the impact on temperature. The simulated scenarios consider a number of households using water heaters to analyze and compare the thermal discomfort index for different interruptions and the effect of using different penalty terms for deviations of the comfort temperature. The obtained results allow designing a proper management strategy to fairly decide which water heaters should be interrupted to guarantee the lower discomfort of users.

Assessing the Risk to Indoor Thermal Environments on Industrial Sites Offering AHU Capacity for Demand Response

Increasing participation in demand response within the industrial sector may be crucial to growing the levels of available flexible capacity required to reliably control national electricity grids as renewable generation increases to satisfy emission targets. This research aims to assist the uptake of demand response in the industrial sector by investigating risk to indoor thermal environments on industrial sites offering air handling unit capacity for demand response. This evaluation uses a systematic model-based approach, calibrated and validated with empirical data from a relevant case study industrial building to assess risk through a number of scenarios. The conditions investigated cover several relevant grid response times and durations, and national and international extreme external ambient temperatures in the past, present and future under a variety of temperature limits. The study demonstrated that there is very low risk to the case study site participating in demand response, with only 15 of 264 initial and 284 of 936 total scenarios triggering any risk. The major factors affecting risk levels identified were more stringent temperature limits and the influence of more extreme climates. The development and implementation of this concept has considerable potential to benefit industrial participants and the wider national electricity grids.

The Nexus of World Electricity and Global Sustainable Development

The main part of mankind’s ecological footprint is the carbon footprint, a measure of the environmental impact of humanity’s energy release from fossil fuels. The use of fossil fuels will have to change in the forthcoming decades to a largely climate-neutral use of solar energy enabled by dramatic cost reductions for PV and wind energy systems. The impact of this trend on world society has been discussed in a previous paper. In connection with these important technical developments, the role of electricity, its transport and storage will alter in the coming decades, allowing the design and use of larger and larger electricity grids and a parallel use of hydrogen for both storage and energy transport. This will further change the energy landscape of the world. All these developments and their relationship to global sustainable development are elaborated in this cross-disciplinary paper by specifically analyzing whether the Sustainable Development Goals by the United Nations are an effective road map for humanity to handle global climate change risks.

Digitalisation potentials in the electricity ecosystem: lesson learnt from the comparison between Germany and Denmark

Digitalisation potentials in the electricity sector are frequently discussed around the world, especially in Europe which has the largest interconnected continental electricity grid in the world. The analysis and comparison of electricity ecosystems between countries can help to enhance international understanding and cooperation. It can also enable businesses to expand. However, little literature has covered the cross-national comparisons of digitalisation potentials in the electricity sector. This paper uses the business ecosystem architecture development methodology to identify commonalities and differences between two electricity ecosystems: Germany and Denmark. The result shows that there are many similarities between the two countries, but the roles of market framework provider, market supervision, and metering point operator are performed by different actors. By comparing the value chain segments, the main differences between Denmark and Germany are the share of renewable energy generation, the organisation of the transmission system, smart meter installation & operations, and the national electricity data hub. Based on the comparisons, six recommendations for the digitalisation of the electricity ecosystem are proposed: digitalisation for enabling more renewable energy resources for electricity generation, digitalisation in the electricity grids, digitalisation ib. the electricity markets, digitalisation on the demand side, especially the transport sector, and regulation-driven digitalisation of the electricity ecosystem.

Can Blockchain Strengthen the Energy Internet?

Emergence of the Energy Internet (EI) demands restructuring of traditional electricity grids to integrate heterogeneous energy sources, distribution network management with grid intelligence and big data management. This paradigm shift is considered to be a breakthrough in the energy industry towards facilitating autonomous and decentralized grid operations while maximizing the utilization of Distributed Generation (DG). Blockchain has been identified as a disruptive technology enabler for the realization of EI to facilitate reliable, self-operated energy delivery. In this paper, we highlight six key directions towards utilizing blockchain capabilities to realize the envisaged EI. We elaborate the challenges in each direction and highlight the role of blockchain in addressing them. Furthermore, we summarize the future research directive in achieving fully autonomous and decentralized electricity distribution networks, which will be known as Energy Internet.