PROJECT-INFORMATION
Kick-off KIT
Objectives
Objectives
The SmILES proposal contributes to the “European Common Research and Innovation Agendas (ECRIAs) in support of the implementation of the SET Action Plan” (LCE 33). The objective of SmiLES is twofold:
- Obtaining fundamental knowledge about linking and optimising heterogeneous energy carriers and systems including storage and renewable energy technologies across geographical scales from local to national.
- For the European level: Development and dissemination of guidelines for modelling, simulating and optimising such systems. These guidelines will be derived from aggregated and merged knowledge of five different energy system configurations, which combine heat- and electrical power systems with storage capabilities (CHPS).
SmILES' objectives are compliant with ECRIA's, as national research efforts are largely integrated and still existing gaps in the deployment of hybrid energy systems can be identified. It creates synergies at EU and national levels and avoids duplication of efforts. Additionally SmILES will point out opportunities of joining the information, communication and physical technologies in the energy domain, especially in flexible thermal and electrical energy generation, demand side response and storage, as well as efficient heating and cooling technologies. It will depict synergies between energy vectors and demand analysis, including at least partially the exploitation of Big Data methods.
Project
Project
The project “Smart Integration of Energy Storages in Local Multi Energy Systems for maximising the Share of Renewables in Europe’s Energy Mix” (SmILES) is a joint project with AIT, DTU, EDF SA (and EIFER EWIV), Vito/EnergyVille and EERA AISBL. SmILES zooms in simulation and optimisation of smart storage in local energy systems for increasing the understanding and transparency of innovative multi-energy projects. Setting up a shared data and information platform and effective dissemination of related results will contribute to competence building. Supplementing the research activities, a long-lasting framework across EERA JP borders has been set up by the consortium for extending storage integration technologies by linking other EERA members, stakeholders, energy supplier and industry.
Work Packages
Work Packages
It is foreseen to build up i) a lean organisation and governance structure for sharing knowledge, to define synergies, needs and gaps for future research activities (WP1 Project Management). Furthermore it is planned to ii) establish a communication network with stakeholders energy supplier and industry (WP7 Dissemination and Communication) and iii) the set-up of a digital information and data platform on data sets and smart hybrid system configurations (WP6 Shared Data and Information Platform). In the framework of the project the variety of national specific knowledge on smart storage integration will be focussed on the five nations, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France and Germany, represented by the six partners. The chosen system configurations have been developed in context of either recently completed or ongoing national projects.
The WP structure distinguishes managing and disseminating actions (WP1, WP6 and WP7) and several research actions (WP2 to WP5). The coordination actions concentrate on the establishment of a project specific governance structure, management, regular communication processes, and the setup of a data and information platform. The research actions aim for collecting and exchanging knowledge gained from nationally funded projects by developing a rich format for describing different system configurations (WP2). Instrumentation and data processing guidelines (WP3) will be developed and selected system configurations will be modelled (WP5) according to the generated joint criteria (WP4), making a jointly analysis and evaluation of results and finally defining best practice guidelines.
WP1 will be concerned with the general coordination of the consortium including management of legal, financial and administrative aspects. It will also monitor the coherence between the different work packages in order to respect the project’s objectives, its overall internal coherence, time schedule, issuance of deliverables and periodic reporting to the European Commission. The governance of SmILES will be embedded in the EERA governance. This will lead to an adaptation of the EERA Internal Rules of Procedures, which allows the partners to set up their own communications infrastructure and special procedures for a long-lasting co-operation. The close link with EERA will also enable the exchange of researchers and the use of non ECRIA facilities, in cases this is of added value for the ECRIA partners.
WP2 will build up on the knowledge available from national funded projects. Study cases with innovative system configurations, and a high potential for replication at the European level will be selected. The aim is to define the scope of adequate and relevant study cases to investigate the impact of storage installation facing questions: What dimensioning is the best suited for the storage infrastructure and the linked utilities and networks? What operation strategy is optimised for more flexibility and stability? What local opportunities or obstacles (e.g. from the politics, the market rules or the local resources available) can occur to support or hinder the deployment?
The selected system configurations will constitute a pool of reference cases, to trigger the gathering of best practices and to be consulted for future users. Perimeters of interest such as industrial areas, urban areas with a high density of middle-rise buildings or islands, can be assessed to generate first reference examples, and support future European deployments. An appropriate coordination between partners will favour the selection procedure, taking into account the barriers which can occur (e.g. from the difficulty to convince local stakeholders or to get access to appropriate data).
Standard rich formats will be developed to ensure a detailed and homogeneous access to the relevant information about the study case description and the corresponding data for modelling.
WP3 aims at advancing the state of the art primarily in two areas. The first one concerns the development of a portable description of controllers. While mature approaches to this problem exist, such as for example the IEC 61499 standard, these are not well suited to the portable simulation of energy systems because the modelling effort is high and certain types of systems are difficult to represent. The ambition of WP3 is to propose a less universal and very pragmatic description of control behaviour, which targets a much narrower application area (simulation of energy systems) and can therefore be optimised to the needs of that application.
The second advancement area will be the development of a systematic approach towards the synthesis of different types of input data for energy system simulations. The ambition of WP3 here is to follow a systematic approach aiming at producing a catalogue of available methods and an evaluation of these methods’ properties and limitations.
We aim at a general modelling approach for hybrid energy systems, which can be integrated into various modelling environments dealing with hybrid energy systems. The main focus of our work is on collaboration and cross-validation of the optimisation results. For that purpose we attempt to define a set of rules, which guarantee a high degree of exchangeability between the partners and ensure that the calculations can be reproduced. The basis is a set of standardised components with consolidated modelling equations and parameters. Furthermore we specify standard cost functions, optimisation strategies and evaluation procedures independent of the modelling platform. With this set of rules (our “optimisation recipe”) the optimisation results can be replicated in a broad range of modelling platforms. Our approach is not limited to the joint optimisation of electrical and thermal storages. The long-term goal is to extend our modelling approach for hybrid energy systems in follow-up projects to include all other energy storage technologies, such as electrical, thermal, chemical, mechanical or superconducting storages, and to extend this technology to large-scale energy systems.
The ambition of WP5 is to develop a catalogue of best practises of modelling, operating and integrating multi-energy systems with storages. This catalogue of best practise is intended to serve as guideline for stakeholders in the field, leading – in the long run – to a steadily increasing share of renewables in the European energy mix.
As part of the catalogue of best practises, we intend to assess strengths and limitations of the considered modelling approaches with respect to different system configurations. Furthermore, the assessment of consistency between the different modelling and approaches with respect to the joint criteria of WP4 shall be addressed.
Finally, an important aspect of WP5 is the identification of key success factors and barriers from a socio-technical point of view. This way, we hope to shrink partially the gap between development of purely technical concepts and their successful implementation in socio-economic contexts.
The shared data and information platform implemented in WP6 will serve as a common entry point for accessing all project results and the data collected within the project. The platform will integrate advanced visualisation tools and search technology to explore easily data and project results through the web interface of the platform. This will be of great value for users looking for information about combining renewables and storage options or are in the need of data for creating own models. The project partners aiming at enhancing and running this data and information platform far beyond the project’s life-time to become a central access point for information about smart energy solutions combining renewables and storage in Europe.
The shared data and information platform and the tools implemented for the platform will provide a good foundation for the dissemination activities and for further projects in which the data and information base contained in the platform can be enhanced to cover other smart energy technologies beside storage and renewables as well. In this respect the platform can be extended towards a central information hub on smart energy technology concepts, data and best practices.
While WP6 addresses technical and scientific users on a high professional level in the first place. WP7 will perform the peer-focussed dissemination of project results, i.e. an account of the work performed in the project, excluding the user-focussed dissemination conducted in WP6. This means, that WP7 rather includes the direct project specific communication to Advisory and Governing board with the aim of getting feedback and establishing a regular dialogue including workshops. This contains the establishment of a professional dissemination with students and public via MOOCs including webinars in order to raise the knowledge about and awareness for this subject beyond the project period.