News
NODES Partner Establishing Flexibility Markets in Various OPENTUNITY Pilot Sites
NODES Partner Establishing Flexibility Markets in Various OPENTUNITY Pilot Sites
22/03/2024
NODES is an independent market operator based in Norway, dedicated to managing an integrated marketplace that fosters the exchange and trading of flexibility across all grid levels. By doing so, NODES plays a pivotal role in optimizing the utilization of flexible resources within the grid.
Gesa Milzer, Senior Project Manager at NODES, sheds light on the OPENTUNITY initiative, which focuses on establishing flexibility markets, innovative market solutions, and a spectrum of products and services across various pilot sites in Europe:
– In Spain, collaborating with ANELL (DSO) and Estabanell (FSP).
– In Switzerland, partnering with AEM (DSO) and SUPSI (FSP).
– In Greece, working closely with HEDNO (DSO), IPTO (TSO), HyperTech (Aggregator), and ICCS (FSP).
These pilot-specific solutions are meticulously developed in collaboration with respective partners and subjected to diverse use cases to assess their practicality and necessitate any technical or operational adjustments. Ultimately, the goal is to transition these developed solutions from the testing phase into widely utilized operational products and services.
Read more here.
OPENTUNITY Plenary Meeting Sparks Innovation in Energy Solutions in Granollers
OPENTUNITY Plenary Meeting Sparks Innovation in Energy Solutions in Granollers
09/02/2024
On February 6th and 7th, the OPENTUNITY consortium convened for its Plenary Meeting at Anell premises in Granollers, Spain, a pivotal hub within our pilot site network.
The meeting buzzed with energy and enthusiasm as discussions delved into the core pillars of our project: OPENFLEX, OPENGRID, and OPENABILITY. These initiatives signify our dedication to fostering flexibility in the prosumer’s environment, enhancing grid management technologies for DSOs/TSOs, and streamlining procedures to boost interoperability. Furthermore, partners addressed the different use cases in our pilot sites across Spain, Greece, Slovenia, and Switzerland.
Crucially, these deliberations marked pivotal steps towards our forthcoming report to the EU Commission. This report, a culmination of 16 months of dedicated work, represents a significant milestone in our journey towards shaping the future of energy systems in Europe.
Beyond the boardroom, the consortium had the privilege of immersing ourselves in Anell’s facilities—a testament to the evolution from a textile company to a dynamic DSO. This firsthand experience provided invaluable insights into the practical applications of our work, grounding our discussions in real-world contexts.
Spanish pilot site prepares to test OPENTUNITY’s uses cases
Spanish pilot site prepares to test OPENTUNITY’s uses cases
02/02/2024
ANELL partner, the lead partner for the Spanish pilot site, is prepared to star testing the OPENTUNITY’s use cases. After a period identifying challenges in the company’s grid and defining corresponding solutions, the Catalan DSO initiated the process of delineating the pilot site’s activity area. This mainly covers municipality of Santa Eulàlia de Ronçana, a town located in the county of Vallés Oriental (Barcelona), spanning 14 km2 with a mix of urban and rural areas. ANELL manages almost 80km of Low Voltage (LV) lines, 30km of Medium Voltage (MV) lines and is supplying around 2.500 Smart Meters.
Santa Eulalia de Ronçana was selected based on the high frequency of non-technical losses in the area and the amount of residential photovoltaic solar panel installations, around 120 with a maximum power capacity of around 1 MW. This aligns with ANELL’s main concerns of minimizing losses and maximizing service quality.
OPENTUNITY’s Use Cases will be very valuable for ANELL in addressing different challenges. Some will focus on determining discrepancies on grid’s topology and estimating the state of the network to tackle the low observability in the LV grid, facilitating the identification of discrepancies and faults. Others will address strategies for managing the recent increase of Distributed Energy Resources (DER), different strategies to deal with congestions and loss of capacity due to this massive penetration will be done.
There is also an emphasis on supporting the energy transition by fostering demand-side flexibility to handle congestions and mitigate the impact of DER.
Finally, other use cases will focus on detecting of non-technical losses along the grid, calculating MV lines capacity due to thermal variations, and enhancing system reliability and resilience by identifying critical assets and developing aging and failure models.
These efforts collectively address ANELL’s main needs forming the core of the Spanish Pilot.
Pilot site in Spain.
ANELL premises in Granollers, Barcelona.
Working to reach final users
Working to reach final users
23/01/2024
How will OPENTUNITY solutions reach users and become viable business models?
In OPENTUNITY, we are not just building a network of innovations to open up the electricity ecosystem to various stakeholders, but also to provide a genuine opportunity for real decarbonization. Our specific goal at OPENTUNITY is to ensure that our innovations reach the intended actors and effectively enter the market.
By providing social science and economic expertise, the JOANNEUM RESEARCH LIFE team has a special role in OPENTUNITY. They ensure that the solutions developed in OPENTUNITY find their way to users and become part of viable business models. Currently, they are developing an integrated research strategy that enables collecting close user feedback for the technological features to be tested at the demo sites in Greece, Slovenia, Spain, and Switzerland.
The feedback tool will provide a low-threshold opportunity for users to provide feedback on their experience and enable them to submit concrete ideas for improvement.
In parallel, preliminary business models and value chains for each OPENTUNITY demo site have been created. They will be further detailed and quantified as the project moves along. Stay tuned!
Here our partners from JOANNEUM RESEARCH LIFE: Stephan Schwarzinger, Michael Brenner-Fließer and Camilla Neumann.
Driving Energy Flexibility Forward: UL’s Innovative Forecast Models in OPENTUNITY
The OPENTUNITY project aims to empower end-users by leveraging their flexibility assets within the ecosystem, supporting local system operators and creating new revenue streams. Aggregators play a key role by gathering flexibility from various sources and offering it to energy markets, optimizing asset activation when bids are accepted. This is where the University of Ljubljana (UL) contributes significantly.
UL’s main involvement in OPENTUNITY is in Task 4.4, focusing on developing a method for optimal flexibility selection from units of various sizes and types. The outcome will be an algorithm for optimal selection based on market participation (DSO or TSO) and minimal cost criteria.
We’ve adopted a bottom-up approach, splitting the task into:
- Baseline and flexibility forecast models for EV fleet (AVANT) and HEMS fleet (AMIBIT).
- Optimal selection algorithm.
Currently, we’re focused on developing forecast models for EV and HEMS fleets using Python, Keras, and Tensorflow. The analysis of charging point (CP) data for EV fleets shows significant flexibility potential during night hours by postponing charging sessions.
The difference between charging session length can be seen in the figure below.
This flexibility potential is further illustrated in the figure below.
In the coming months, UL will continue to delve into baseline and flexibility forecasting for EV and HEMS fleets, marking the initial step towards developing the optimal selection innovation and empowering end-users within the flexibility ecosystem.
Embarking on AI-Powered Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM) Algorithms
Embarking on AI-Powered Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM) Algorithms
11/10/2023
ETRA‘s role in this project extends beyond mere coordination; it also involves the delivery of innovative technologies and solutions to empower grid operators. One significant stride in this journey is ETRA’s work in the development of Artificial Intelligence-based Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM) algorithms. This algorithm belongs to the OPENFLEX innovation.
These advanced algorithms harness data derived from overall household energy consumption, enabling the inference of active appliances and their respective energy usage at any given moment. What sets NILM apart is its ability to achieve disaggregated energy consumption insights without the need for submetering, offering cost-effective benefits to end-users.
ETRA has conducted extensive research in this field, meticulously assessing the State of the Art. The most promising avenue for its work is the development of semi-supervised algorithms, an area that remains relatively uncharted in the realm of AI. Within the OPENTUNITY project, ETRA is committed to expanding knowledge in this domain, ultimately delivering new technology to European households built on this innovative and promising approach.