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Demand Response Interoperability for the residential European Energy Market - Identifying Standardization Gaps between a Demand Response pilot project and a proposed best practice

Sondermann, Matthias (2017) Demand Response Interoperability for the residential European Energy Market - Identifying Standardization Gaps between a Demand Response pilot project and a proposed best practice.

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Abstract:The transformation to a smart grid is a crucial step in this century and is supported and accompanied by regulations to encourage a reduction in energy consumption and investment in intelligent infrastructure. One prominent example is the European Union effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 20% compared to the 1990 levels and increase the share of energy produced to 20% by 2020. With an increase in distributed renewable energy sources, the efficiency of production decreases as these sources are to a large extend uncontrollable. The goal of reducing energy consumption can be achieved by shifting the energy consumption to times in which renewable production is high. This can be achieved with demand-side management (DSM), especially by establishing demand response (DR) programs. DR ranges from dynamic prices for energy that vary over time or incentives that are paid for load shifting at the consumer premises. These programs require the consumer to actively change his consumption pattern and are therefore subject to automation to increase the likeliness of participation. To circumvent a vendor-lock for these automation systems, the communication between the energy supplier and the consuming household has to be standardized. In this thesis, the DR program at Stadtwerke Wolfhagen was examined to spot the level of standardization within the program and reveal existing standards in DR communication, with the goal to increase the interoperability of the Wolfhagen program towards a DR communication standard. To achieve this, the SGAM framework to describe smart grid use cases was facilitated to describe the use case in Wolfhagen. During the work of this thesis it turned out that there is not yet a standard for DR communication. Nonetheless, by choosing a reference specification as a likely future standard, we analyzed the Wolfhagen use case and the reference specification, OpenADR, with the same underlying framework, to examine the level of interoperability with the reference specification. The result showed that Stadtwerke Wolfhagen has several interoperability gaps to OpenADR. These results are demonstrated by an interoperability matrix that has emerged during this research. It shows that the interoperability levels used to distinguish the level of interoperability are either not sufficiently distinguishable or that the use cases that have been mapped in this thesis need further decomposition to make the result of the matrix more descriptive. Further, the research revealed that the future market model of the European smart grid is yet to be established. There is no agreed upon standard for Demand Response communication in Europe, there is uncertainty about the future market model, and standardization in parts of the smart grid are still missing. Based on these facts, Stadtwerke Wolfhagen is advised to improve interoperability towards a reference specification by specifically improving on communication semantics.
Item Type:Essay (Master)
Clients:
Stadtwerke Wolfhagen GmbH, Wolfhagen, Germany
Faculty:EEMCS: Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science
Subject:54 computer science
Programme:Business Information Technology MSc (60025)
Link to this item:https://purl.utwente.nl/essays/73435
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