Research Platform: Decentralized Energy System for Sector Coupling

Abstract

Industrial facilities usually need multiple energy subsystems, e.g., for heat, cold, and electric power supply. Normally, these energy subsystems are controlled locally and independent of each other. Coupling of the different subsystems can open up additional potential. Fraunhofer IISB has developed a demonstration and research platform for investigating the benefits of such sector coupling. A major precondition is to understand the energy flows in the system and establish an overall and flexible system control to realize the required algorithms for setting up an intelligent decentralized energy system. Major components of the overall system are various storages, which extend the degree of freedom for sector coupling and increase the effectiveness of the different subsystems.

Unified Energy Agents for Combined District Heating and Electrical Network Simulation

“…Recent examples for combined simulations of heat and electrical networks were presented for example in [13,14] for domestic areas and in [15] for an industrial site. While addressing similar scenarios like InSekt, these works stay on the level of mathematical modelling, while the energy agent approach is much closer to the required technical implementation.…”

Increasing Energy Efficiency and Flexibility by Forecasting Production Energy Demand Based on Machine Learning

“…These forecasts use production planning data and weather forecasts to predict load curves for the electricity, heating and cooling sectors. They can be used to generate an operating strategy for the EGI components in order, for example, to charge or discharge storage facilities in an optimized manner, to run energy plants at the optimal operating point and to reduce load peaks [9,12].…”