No abstract

The Smart Energy Grid concept aims to exploit Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) towards making the energy sector more secure, reliable and efficient, while the electricity markets are rapidly becoming more liberalized with new business actors/models being introduced. In particular, passive energy consumers are being transformed into active energy prosumers (i.e. both producers and consumers), while energy aggregation/services companies are emerging as intermediaries in the so called "Internet of Energy" arena. Prosumers need to have their energy assets efficiently managed and participate in the market independently of their size and negotiating power, while aggregators aim at maximizing prosumers' benefits by representing them as a single big power entity in the wholesale energy market. This paper introduces the Virtual MicroGrid (VMG) concept, in which multiple energy prosumers are orchestrated into bigger associations towards optimizing the association's benefits. An innovative decision support system platform is presented showcasing that the management of aggregated energy resources can outperform state-of-the-art solutions that manage resources at the individual prosumer's level. The platform's implementation is based on virtualization techniques and a wide range of functionalities are described, tested and validated. Datasets from 37 real-life prosumers are used and results of various decision-making algorithms show that under different system operation contexts, dynamic formation of prosumers' groups (clusterings) can provide remarkable energy savings and monetary profits to the end users.

No abstract

No abstract

Liberalized electricity markets, smart grids and high penetration of renewable energy sources (RESs) led to the development of novel markets, whose objective is the harmonization between production and demand, usually noted as real time of flexibility markets. This necessitates the development of novel pricing schemes able to allow energy service providers (ESPs) to maximize their aggregated profits from the traditional markets (trading between wholesale/day-ahead and retail markets) and the innovative flexibility markets. In the same time, ESPs have to offer their end users (consumers) competitive (low cost) energy services. In this context, novel pricing schemes must act, among others, as automated demand side management (DSM) techniques that are able to trigger the desired behavioral changes according to the flexibility market prices in energy consumption curves (ECCs) of the consumers. Energy pricing schemes proposed so far, e.g. realtime pricing, interact in an efficient way with wholesale market. But they do not provide strong enough financial incentives to consumers to modify their energy consumption habits towards energy cost curtailment. Thus, they do not interact efficiently with flexibility markets. Therefore, we develop a flexibility real-time pricing (FRTP) scheme, which offers a dynamically adjustable level of financial incentives to participating users by fairly rewarding the ones that make desirable behavioral changes in their ECCs. Performance evaluation results demonstrate that the proposed FRTP is able to offer a 15%-30% more attractive trade-off between the stacked profits of ESPs, i.e. the sum of the profits from retail and flexibility markets, and the satisfaction of the consumers.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract