Scalable Supply and Demand Matching Involving Up-to-Date Information from Individual Prosumers
Abstract
Maintaining the equilibrium between supply and demand is the prime prerequisite for the reliable operation of power grids. The vast majority of producers and consumers (prosumers) in power grids is however presently not able to communicate current or anticipated behavior. Grid operators are instead urged to employ prediction methods and compensate any deviations with reserve energy, whose annual procurement costs can run into billions of euros for large markets. The situation is aggravated by millions of novel, volatile prosumers (e.g., photovoltaics, electric vehicles) appearing at the grid edges in efforts to combat climate change. In this work, we present an approach for efficiently communicating and matching possible levels of supply and demand by prosumers in a market-oriented fashion, to provide grid operators with an additional means for stabilization and hence a reduction of reserve energy requirements. Tailored to the natural hierarchical grid structures and communication mechanisms present or readily deployable alongside them, our approach employs a combination of aggregation and approximation mechanisms to achieve scalability. Our evaluations show that our approach enables sub-second decision intervals for grids of realistic proportions while requiring negligible amounts of energy storage capacity to compensate for inaccuracies and signaling delays.
René Glebke, M.Sc.
Researcher
Maximilian Winck
Stefan Lenz
Dr. Mirko Stoffers
Postdoctoral Researcher
