Year: 2015
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: The electricity market was introduced in the European countries following the Directive 96/92/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council concerning "common rules for the internal market in electricity".Up to now the market is working properly for big producers, retailers and users, while the small consumers and prosumers cannot access directly the market and cannot be influenced by signal pricing.Distributed generation from renewable and non--programmable energy sources is becoming widespread.This requires a more flexible management of distribution grids, also involving energy storages, both at the prosumers and on the network.For these reasons, a "smarter" grid is needed by Transmission and Distribution System Operators (TSOs and DSOs) together with retailers and market operators in order to face in their activities.To move forward along this direction, a flexible smart metering architecture for multiple energy vectors (FLEXMETER) is needed.Hence, such architecture must be able to: i) integrate the already available components and devices in the grid; ii) combine and correlate information from meters of different services (e.g.electricity, water, gas and district heating); iii) provide advanced services to users, DSOs, retailers and other utilities; iv) enhance the retail market. Proposed approachThe existing applications acknowledge that metering infrastructure is an enabling technology that needs to be coupled with innovative services to reach energy management by means of rewards, automation and information.In order to reinforce customers' engagement in achieving energy efficiency, number of utilities already operates demand response and direct load control to limit and shift the peak loads.However, new services can be integrated focusing on more complex technical applications, transparent for the end--user but nevertheless with higher social impact.FLEXMETER pursues the ambition of innovating this scenario exploiting:• multi--service approach that uses information coming from heterogeneous smart meters (e.g.electric, water, gas, district heating) to provide general purpose services; • substation meters to improve fault tolerance and demand response capabilities of the network, taking into account local electric storage and generation; • advanced Non--Intrusive Appliances Load Monitoring (NIALM) techniques to profile user behaviours and introducing a user signature of energy consumption/production regarding electricity, gas, water and heating; • demand response and load prediction algorithms that exploit information about energy flows from meters and NIALM profiles.To achieve this, as shown in Figure 1, FLEXMETER integrates heterogeneous off--the--shelf smart meters placed at the users for electric, water, heating and gas metering.Such heterogeneous meters directly communicate with a building concentrator, which is in charge to enable a bidirectional communication with the central cloud system.For what concern the electricity grid, FLEXMETER also integrates off--the--shelf electric smart meters deployed in MV/LV (Medium Voltage/Low Voltage) substations.The central cloud system is in charge of: i) collecting data from the building concentrators, thus from the different meters at user's home, and from MV/LV substation meters; ii) post--processing incoming information exploiting algorithms for data collection, fusion and mining; iii) providing a set
Source: PORTO@Iris
Language: English
Topic: Smart Grid Energy Management
Subfield: Electrical and Electronic Engineering
Field: Engineering
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2173267174