Distribution and Load Management

For the stable operation of the electric grid, it is necessary at any instant to balance energy consumption and energy supply. This balance is increasingly hard to guarantee with the advent of more and more distributed energy sources in the lower levels of the grid, such as wind turbines and PV-panels. Regarding the complexity of the electric grid it is feasible to say that any centralized system with the goal to optimize the overall operation of it will very likely fail to do so, since too many constraints, actors, and control entities are involved. Thus, distributed software systems and control paradigms, as they are researched and developed in our CC Agent Core Technologies, bear strong potential to meet grid management objectives in a bottom-up approach, opposing the traditional view of top-down control that is strongly related to the centralized energy production and grid control architecture of a pre-liberalization energy market.

For the operation of the future electricity grid, some degree of control distribution will be necessary, reflecting the technical and economical structure of electricity networks. In past and current activities, the DAI-Lab has researched and demonstrated smart grid solutions following this distribution paradigm i.e. in the field of distributed storage networks in the DEASYS and He-Lion project. In these projects, grid management strategies and demand response approaches meet electric vehicle and battery storage management with smart charging control software.