Improving stability and utilization of the electricity infrastructure of a neighbourhood

Increasing energy prices and the greenhouse effect lead to more awareness of energy efficiency of electricity supply. During the last years, a lot of technologies and optimization methodologies are developed to increase the efficiency, maintain the grid stability and support large scale introduction of renewable sources. In previous work, we showed the effectiveness of our three-step methodology to reach these objective, consisting of 1) off-line prediction, 2) off-line planning and 3) online scheduling. The goal of this paper is 1) to analyze the impact of installing a local controller in the house and 2) to analyze the stabilizing effect of the optimization algorithms on a large group of houses. To investigate whether it is possible to develop a local controller, a proof-of-concept is built using an embedded PC. The prototype consumes significantly less power than it can save. The stabilizing effect is studied by two large scale use cases. The first one is a simulation of 200 houses that together try to respond on fluctuation in generation of a windmill park. The second one is a simulation of a fleet of 100 electrical cars that need to be charged at night. Using the three step methodology in these two scenarios, the required balancing power, peaks and fluctuations in the required generation of the power plants decrease up to 40%.