Submitted: October 2012
Abstract
In the world today, energy supply is becoming an increasingly important topic. All areas of industry and society, like public transportation or households, benefit from easily accessible energy. Especially energy in the form of electricity is utilized for more and more purposes. While in developed countries, energy use per capita is very high already, there is an especially high trend towards more energy consumption in less developed countries. Most of the energy originates from the use of raw oil and other fossil fuels, the extraction of which is usually connected with pollution of the environment and sometimes social problems. Available resources in our world are depleting. For many fuels, production capacities are already maximized and will decrease in future. Additionally, burning fuels results in emissions of pollutants and of carbon dioxide, increasing the world climate change.
One remedy which is more and more pursued in many first world countries and also increasingly in newly industrialized countries is the exploitation of renewable sources for human energy needs. They can replace parts of primary energy consumption, e.g. in heating.
Conversion of solar and wind energy into electricity without constant supply of material is possible. But the regenerative sources sun and wind do not provide a stable supply of energy. Weather conditions can change in a matter of seconds or minutes and imply an inherent unpredictability of the output of renewable energy production facilities. Thus, unlike basic supply power plants, their power profile may change quickly over time. This volatility increases the importance of regulation capacities to keep the supply steady.
In Germany, traditional options for regulation that are in place are increasingly pressed to keep up stability and reliability of the power supply. The current situation with higher and higher contributions of renewable sources increases the danger of exhausting available regulation capacities and decreases the efficiency of existing facilities through unusual modes of operation.
To handle substantial portions of fluctuating energy in our electricity grid and go towards a completely renewable system, more research has to be done.
We introduce a flexible entity concept with producers, consumers and storage units, composing an ideal electricity grid. This ideal grid abstracts from interconnections. The mathematical model we present can incorporate real input data from the load impact of producers and consumers. It takes into account the potential of control options as well as storage technology. We connect the regulation capacities of entities with incurred costs, which allows comparison of different input scenarios.
The model enables us to formulate a cost minimizing optimization problem. For increased performance in large scenarios, a simulator is developed.
The software we build makes it possible to evaluate complex balancing problems and encourages to refine input scenarios. Additionally, the simulation environment based on the entity concept follows the idea of formulating strategies for cost-efficient behavior of producers, consumers and storage in a scenario.
As result, we aim at evaluations of new scenarios of an energy landscape with renewable sources, as well as the integration of energy storage options.