District heating and cooling networks can pose the possibility of including a variety of renewable energy sources as well as waste heat into a district’s heat supply concept. Unfortunately, low demand densities as they increasingly occur through higher building energy standards and in rural areas render conventional heating and cooling networks inefficient. At the same time, power-to-heat is becoming more and more important to make use of a larger amount of renewable energy sources on the electrical side by providing more flexibility by means of demand response and demand-side management. Within this work, a rural Plus-Energy settlement is presented addressing those topics by a low-temperature district heating and cooling network connected to a novel agrothermal collector supplying 23 residential buildings with decentralized heat pumps and PV systems. The collector, the network, and six of the buildings are equipped with comprehensive monitoring equipment. Within those buildings, forecast and optimization algorithms are implemented to adapt their heat pump operation to enable an increase of self-consumption, to include flexible electricity tariffs, and also to participate in power markets. Thereby, for the low-temperature district heating and cooling network, it has been shown that the concept can operate in the future at competitive heat costs. On the building level, up to 50% of cost savings could be achieved under ideal conditions with the optimization of the self-consumption of PV electricity. However, to ensure optimal results, the individual system components have to be dimensioned for this task.

It becomes essential for Brazil the formation of critical mass and technological base in the microgrid subject and, mainly, the creation of an infrastructure that allows the accomplishment of research in this area of knowledge. Faced with this necessity, it was verified the viability of implementing a laboratory to perform analysis of microgrids systems in the actual premises of the Laboratory of Automation and Simulation of Electrical Systems, which is allocated in Itaipu Technological Park Foundation-Brazil dependencies. In the presented context, this work brings the description of the provisioned infrastructurewhose the main feature will be to add flexibility of analysis through the joint application of real, emulated elements and realtime simulation platform, being at the same level of international reference laboratories as well as the fundamental aspects that provides the basis for your design and the possibilities of research envisaged from its implementation. The joint action of several researchers and enterprises will be stimulated and characterized as fundamental role for the transformation of this laboratory into a national reference in the study of microgrids serving as support for the electrical sector for the complete understanding of the new development trends of the future electrical power.

The generating units form a distributed power generator system that uses biogas as fuel, which is produced on small farms that collect the waste from agricultural activities systems. The supervisory system of a biogas generation unit can monitor local and remote environmental, electrical and mechanical variables of the process and display this data in a user-friendly interface for analysis and decision-making. In addition to the user interface, the collected data will be stored to build the process history and analysis database that will be used as a study source and promotion of new research lines related to this topic.

Abstract. This paper consists on monitoring and analysis of the power quality of a distributed micro-generation connected in low voltage that use the biogas as primary source of power. The generation unit studied in this paper is a rural property dedicated to swine breeding (Colombari Farm). It is located in the city of São Miguel do Iguaçu, on the west region of Parana -Brazil and has a nominal power installed of 75 kVA that is connected to the Parana's Electrical Company (COPEL). The aspects of product quality according to Brazilian and International standards were considered to develop the analysis of power quality and the distributed generation performance comparative. As result, it is expected to acquire the power quality diagnosis and offers of solutions that could adequate the power quality of the generation unit. Also, contribute in the planning and programing of electrical action that compose the generation unit leading to an improvement of the system

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Microgrids (MG) are becoming a definitive solution for the integration of renewable energies sources in the energy matrix. As it becomes an independent cluster of energy apart from the main grid, it needs a specialized control called Microgrid Central Controller (MGCC) and consequently a robust communication layer with the primary controllers in order to prevent failure and disturbances to the grid. In Brazil, an effort has been made to build a laboratory structure to simulate a microgrid environment, but with a field approach. This paper proposes a solution to the communication layer, physical and logical, that meet the requirements of a real field application allowing interconnection of real physical equipment to the testbed. The results indicate that the communication should use a physical interconnection with an Ethernet Based Protocol, considering time synchronization and redundancy.

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Buildings are accountable for about one third of the greenhouse gas emissions in Germany. An important step toward the reduction of greenhouse gases is to decarbonize the power productions and heating systems. However, in an energy system with a high share of renewable energy sources, large shares of energy have to be stored in summer for the winter season. Chemical energy storages, in this case hydrogen, can provide these qualities and offer diverse opportunities for coupling different sectors.In this work, a simulation model is introduced which combines a PEM electrolyzer, a hydrogen compression, a high-pressure storage, and a PEM fuel cell for power and heat production. Applied on a building cluster in a rural area with existing PV modules, this system is optimized for operation as a district heating system based on measured and forecasted data. Evolutionary algorithms were used to determine the optimized system parameters.The investigated system achieves an overall heat demand coverage of 63%. However, the local hydrogen production is not sufficient to meet the fuel cell demand. Several refills of the storage tanks with delivered hydrogen would be necessary within the year studied.