Motivation
Increasing resource prices and ecological considerations are creating the need for smarter power grids. Besides the mere distribution of energy to private, commercial and industrial sites, future power grids also have to be able to manage the distributed production and consumption of energy. The widespread use of renewable energies, e.g., through solar cells, requires the coordination of hundreds (or thousands) of small energy producers instead of a few large power plants we see in current power grids.
The second key challenge for future power grids will be the incorporation of electrically powered cars. These cars present both a challenge and an opportunity for the owner of a power grid. On the one hand, large amounts of energy have to be provided for charging the batteries of these cars; on the other hand these batteries can also contribute to the stability of the power grid by providing massive storage capabilities that can be used to soften load peaks. These storage capacities also play an important role for the efficient usage of renewable energies. Because renewable energy cannot be produced on-demand, large storage capacities are required if a substantial amount of the overall power consumption should be generated out of regenerative resources. Otherwise a lot of the produced energy will be wasted because it is not needed at the time it is produced, an effect that is already observable for some wind energy production sites. By using the batteries of electrically powered cars as energy buffers in these cases, one can greatly increase the efficiency of regenerative power sources.
To decrease the per head energy consumption of the population, smart energy management has to be employed not only in the power grid itself, but also inside the households. A possible scenario is to provide power at varying prices throughout the day, based on the current power demand. A smart energy meter inside the household will supply the power price to intelligent consumers that will optimize their power consumption in order to minimize the overall power costs. Possible examples are a refrigerator that will avoid cooling during load peaks, or a smart washing machine which will start washing when power prices are cheap. Such price mechanisms allows building energy markets that will automatically regulate the power consumption and can be an important building block of stable, decentralized power grids.
A central building block of any of these systems is an efficient, scalable and secure information system. Data has to be acquired, aggregated and stored at thousands of consumers and producers distributed throughout the power grid. This requires highly scalable and reliable information systems that at the same time provide a real-time overview of the state of the power grid to allow regulating the flow of energy through the grid. We call such a combined power grid and computer network an InfoGrid. The development of such an InfoGrid is an important milestone towards next generation power grids.
Related Projects
- The eSOA project
The eSOA project provides the necessary tools for accessing and processing information at the field level devices in an energy network and allows building smart consumer devices and smart buildings for next generation power grids.
- The StreamGlobe Project
The StreamGlobe project provides the necessary infrastructure for building large scale districuted information systems.
- The HiSbase Project
The HiSbase project provides the necessary technology for building scalable and fault-tolerant distributed information systems that are capable to process and store large amounts of data.