Chalmers Campus as a Testbed for Intelligent Grids and Local Energy Systems

Abstract

This paper presents an overview of a testbed for intelligent distribution grids, local energy systems, and energy flexible buildings, which is being developed at the campus of Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden. It describes the test sites, the functionalities, and the planned demonstration activities within the scope of ongoing research projects. The proposed demonstrations include a local energy market platform, energy management solutions for microgrids and smart buildings, as well as voltage control in distribution grids. The paper aims to show how the physical energy supply systems of the university are being adapted to integrate the communication and control setups that provide the technical requirements for smart grid interoperability. As an example, the on-site implementation of remote battery control is presented, where initial results show the feasibility and potential benefits of the external control. Finally, challenges and lessons learned during the development of the testbed are highlighted.

Values and impacts of incorporating local flexibility services in transmission expansion planning

“…The performance of the proposed model is validated on a case study featuring the modified single area IEEE RTS-96 system [14], as its transmission network, and a standard 33-bus radial distribution network [15] representing each connected distribution system. Our model could also be applied to a Case Study featuring real transmission [16] or distribution [17] grids. However, this has been left for future work.…”

Controlling electricity storage to balance electricity costs and greenhouse gas emissions in buildings

“…Photovoltaic (PV) cells and battery storage systems are widely used for energy management in microgrids and commercial buildings (Antoniadou-Plytaria et al 2019;Sepúlveda-Mora and Hegedus 2021;Mariaud et al 2017). Typically these systems are used for minimising the cost of electricity via peak load shaving and energy arbitrage, sometimes in addition to providing reliability and backup functions.…”

Market-Based Energy Management Model of a Building Microgrid Considering Battery Degradation

“…The four models presented in Section II-E have been applied in the simulation studies using an existing 7.2 kWh BES with 6 kW charging/discharging power limits. The BES is installed at the HSB Living Lab (HSB LL) building [28], [29], located at the campus of Chalmers University of Technology. The BES dispatch under Model-1 and Model-2 was demonstrated at the same building to prove the increased accuracy of the measurement-based BES model compared to the conventional model and thus justify its integration in Model-3 and Model-4.…”

“…The server interfaced MATLAB [36] to set up the communication and control interface with the test site. A more detailed description of the control set-up can be found in [29]. A MATLAB to GAMS interface was used for data exchange with the optimization models and to retrieve the BES scheduling solution (power set-points), which was dispatched online.…”