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Abstract Around the world, there is a great concern with the emission of greenhouse gases, creating great interest in turning the energy systems more sustainable. Multi-energy systems are considered as a potential solution to help to this cause and in recent years, it has gained much attention from both research and industry. In this paper, an optimization model is proposed to use the flexibility of multi-energy systems to mitigate the uncertainty associated with wind generation. The differences between the flexibility provided by multi-energy systems and electrical storage systems in the network were studied. The results prove that the flexibility of the multi-energy systems can benefit the system in several aspects and provide insights on which is the best approach to take full advantage of renewable resources even when a high degree of uncertainty is present.

Abstract This paper proposes a two-stage stochastic optimization model to support an aggregator of prosumers in the definition of bids for the day-ahead energy and secondary reserve markets. The aggregator optimizes the prosumers’ flexibility with the objective of minimizing the net cost of buying and selling energy and secondary reserve in both day-ahead and real-time market stages. The uncertainties of the renewable generation, consumption, outdoor temperature, prosumers’ preferences, and house occupancy are modeled through a set of scenarios. For a case study of 1000 prosumers, the results show that the proposed bidding strategy reduces the costs of both aggregator and prosumers by 40% compared to a bidding strategy typically used by retailers.

Abstract The increasing replacement of conventional generators by variable renewable energy sources is reducing the flexibility of the power system, and consequently reducing its reliability indexes. To compensate for this reduction of flexibility, market participation of aggregators of multi-energy systems has been proposed in the literature. Under this scope, this paper presents a network-secure bidding optimization strategy to assist aggregators of multi-energy systems calculating electricity (energy and reserve), gas and carbon bids, considering multi-energy network constraints. This strategy is a distributed approach based on the alternating direction method of multipliers, where the aggregator collaborates with the operators of electricity, gas and heat networks to calculate network-secure bids. The proposed strategy is benchmarked against two other approaches. The results show that the newly developed strategy computes multi-energy and network-secure bids with execution times that suit the timelines of the electricity, gas, and carbon markets. The joint optimization of multi-energy systems reduced the aggregator’s costs by 89% compared to a single energy-vector approach. Furthermore, two sensibility studies were also performed. The first study revealed that in the presence of slow ramp-rate resources (e.g. combined heat and power systems), aggregator’s costs can decrease up to 87% when considering slower response times to the secondary reserve signal. In the second study, it was observed that the bidding behavior of the aggregator only starts changing significantly with carbon prices higher than 200€/tCO2.

Energy efficiency in buildings can be enhanced by several actions: encouraging users to comprehend and then adopt more energy-efficient behaviors; aiding building managers in maximizing energy savings; and using automation to optimize energy consumption, generation, and storage of controllable and flexible devices without compromising comfort levels and indoor air-quality parameters. This paper proposes an integrated Information and communications technology (ICT) based platform addressing all these factors. The gamification platform is embedded in the ICT platform along with an interactive energy management system, which aids interested stakeholders in optimizing “when and at which rate” energy should be buffered and consumed, with several advantages, such as reducing peak load, maximizing local renewable energy consumption, and delivering more efficient use of the resources available in individual buildings or blocks of buildings. This system also interacts with an automation manager and a users’ behavior predictor application. The work was developed in the Horizon 2020 FEEdBACk (Fostering Energy Efficiency and BehAvioral Change through ICT) project.

This paper presents a methodology to make EV able to contribute to secondary frequency regulation, by participating in Automatic Generation Control (AGC). The aggregator entity is used in this methodology to act as intermediate between the AGC and the EV controllers. The case-study used is an approximation of the Portuguese transmission/generation network, including existing tie lines with Spain, to which a solid three-phase short circuit was applied. After the disturbance, the impact of EV in the AGC operation was studied for two different situations: EV contributing to secondary frequency regulation and EV behaving as uncontrollable loads. The results obtained for both situations were then compared, in terms of interconnection active power flows in the existing tie-lines and its re-establishment time.

Abstract The use of fossil fuel vehicles is one of the factors responsible for the degradation of air quality in urban areas. In order to reduce levels of air pollution in metropolitan areas, several countries have encouraged the use of electric vehicles in the cities. However, due to the high investment costs in this class of vehicles, it is expected that the spatial distribution of electric vehicles' adopters will be heterogeneous. The additional charging power required by electric vehicles' batteries can change operation and expansion planning of power distribution utilities. In addition, urban planning agencies should analyze the most suitable locations for the construction of electric vehicle recharging stations. Thus, in order to provide information for the planning of electric mobility services in the city, this paper presents a spatiotemporal model for estimating the rate of electric vehicles' adopters per subareas. Results are spatial databases that can be viewed in geographic information systems to observe regions with greater expectancy of residential electric vehicle adopters. These outcomes can help utilities to develop new services that ground on the rising availability of electric mobility in urban zones.

Recent studies found that the adoption of distributed energy resources (DER) tends to cluster spatially and temporally which has significant implications for distribution network planning. Currently, residential DER adoption is mostly driven by public support schemes, also called incentive designs. Therefore, changes in those incentive designs will result in alternative spatiotemporal DER adoption patterns that affect distribution networks differently. Consequently, distribution network operators urgently need to understand the effects of energy policy changes on the spatial distribution of DER to guide network expansion based on realistic scenarios. The presented work and tool allow network operators to plan network expansion with robustness under future incentive design changes.

This paper presents the results of a dynamic behaviour analysis study developed with the objective of quantifying the amount of wind power that can be safely integrated in an isolated electricity grid where Electric Vehicles (EVs) are present. The assessment was performed considering two distinct situations: a) when EVs are only in charging mode and b) when EVs participate in primary frequency control. The test system, a small island, contains, in addition to wind generation, a small amount of solar PV plants and four conventional diesel generators. Only wind power influence in system's frequency was assessed since, from a dynamic perspective, this is the renewable resource whose high intermittency level might be more harmful for the electric system operation. Sudden wind variations were simulated and, for both situations, a) and b), the amount of Intermittent Renewable Energy Sources was maximized, keeping always the grid frequency within the limits defined by the power quality standards.

Abstract The three-phase state estimation algorithms developed for distribution systems (DS) are based on traditional approaches, requiring components modeling and the complete knowledge of grid parameters. These algorithms are capable of dealing with the particular characteristics of DS but cannot be used in cases where grid topology and parameters are unknown, which is the most common situation in existing low voltage grids. This paper presents a novel three-phase state estimator for DS that enables the explicit estimation of voltage magnitudes and phase angles in all phases, neutral, and ground wires even when grid topology and parameters are unknown. The proposed approach is based on the use of auto-associative neural networks, the autoencoders (AE), which only require an historical database and few quasi-real-time measurements to perform an effective state estimation. Two test cases were used to evaluate the algorithm's performance: a low and a medium voltage grid. Results show that the algorithm provides accurate results even without information about grid topology and parameters. Several tests were performed to evaluate the best AE configuration. It was found that training an AE for each network feeder leads generally to better results than having a single AE for the entire system. The same happened when different AE were trained for each network phase in comparison with a single AE for the three phases.