Project Participants

Households
Households are the centre of e-balance project. They are empowered with ICT solutions to participate into the energy market actively, contributing with smart driven decisions to flatten the energy demand curve.

Energy supplier
Energy suppliers and aggregators make possible the e-balance framework and the proposed business models, leading the contract conditions to benefit customers and grid operators at the same time and unlocking electric grid flexibility.

Distribution System Operator
The DSO is the operator and owner of the electric infrastructure. In the context of e-balance it is a market player utilising the balancing system to realise operational goals beyond nowadays conditions through the unlocked flexibility.
Households
Our energy manager is designed to enable and unlock flexibility in your electricity consumption to the system. To accomplish this, the energy manager will follow the following fully automated basic stepwise approach:
- A balancing target is defined
- The future production will be estimated by using weather forecasts (KNMI, MeteoGroup, etc.)
- The future consumption will also be estimated by using measurements from the past
- The energy exchange with the grid will be forecast locally by the energy manager by combining 2 and 3
- Shortages and surpluses with respect to the balancing target are determined. The energy manager uses this to determine whether you are expected to acquire electricity from the grid or whether you will be supplying it to the grid.
- Another energy manager will operate at the neighbourhood level. It will request all the house-level energy managers to submit the expected energy exchange. Subsequently, it will determine the shortages and surpluses at the neighbourhood level. Following which, a request is made to all energy managers to reduce the shortages and surpluses, bringing the system in balance.
- This process is repeated every 15 minutes, supplying a forecast for an entire day ahead.
- You load your washing machine at 08:00 in the morning
- You choose the desired program and your appliance indicates the selected program will take 1 hour to complete
- You indicate that it should finish this program before 18:00
- The system will determine when the washing machine should be turned on somewhere in between 08:00 and 17:00, making sure the washing program is finished by 18:00
However, if you have a busy day and only remember around noon that you still need to put some cloths in the washing machine. Instead of the time span from 08:00-17:00 to start the device, it will now have 12:00 to 17:00 to work with. This means less flexibility for the system, but it suits your life. The strength of the e-balance system is in the freedom of choice of its users. You determine how flexible you are in helping out with reducing shortages or surpluses of energy. We advocate providing flexibility without the loss of comfort. An automated system suits this philosophy, so that you can focus on other things. You determine the boundaries for the system. For example, your washing machine or dryer can be used as described above, always, while the inverter of your PV rooftop installation will only reduce its production when a grid failure is expected.
Finally, it is also possible to look at the energy mix. In other words, how green your energy really is.
Energy suppliers
The system enables an energy supplier or (local) energy corporation to balance the energy exchange of its customers or members, securing a balanced portfolio on a 15 minute basis. Everybody is a user of the system. This means small and large consumers, prosumers and large scale energy producers. The same algorithms can be used to connect large and small scale consumption and production. The project focusses on small consumers and prosumers though.
We only consider the point of connection for balancing. This means that from an energy supplier point of view we will only see the net energy exchange. This is the part of the user‘s total energy production and consumption that is actually available to the market and affects the grid. The balancing system will request every hierarchically attached energy manager which contribution to a balancing goal can be realised. The energy manager that can contribute the most, will be rewarded accordingly.
In the basis, the following stepwise approach will be followed:
- A balancing target is defined
- The future production will be estimated by using weather forecasts (KNMI, MeteoGroup, etc.)
- The future consumption will also be estimated by using measurements from the past
- The energy exchange with the grid will be forecast locally by the energy manager by combining 2 and 3
- Shortages and surpluses with respect to the balancing target are determined. The energy manager uses this to determine whether you are expected to acquire electricity from the grid or whether you will be supplying it to the grid.
- Another energy manager will operate at the neighbourhood level. It will request all the house-level energy managers to submit the expected energy exchange. Subsequently, it will determine the shortages and surpluses at the neighbourhood level. Following which, a request is made to all energy managers to reduce the shortages and surpluses, bringing the system in balance.
- This process is repeated every 15 minutes, supplying a forecast for an entire day ahead.
An energy corporation could for example be active at every secondary substation through which its members are exchanging energy. Balancing would in this case be virtual and unrelated to geography, but under the hood, local grid constraints are taken into account. The “copper plate” model of today’s market can be active, but with built-in congestion management standing watch.
In this system, every secondary substation will have a grid management unit that also acts as energy manager. It uses local grid capacities and conditions to determine whether a planned energy exchange is possible. These energy managers can also be active virtualised in a datacentre, provided that the grid management part can be supplied with measurements from the secondary substation. These energy managers balance supply and demand through an iterative algorithm, by following the previously mentioned step wise approach. It is not important how a user realises a certain energy exchange, as long as the deviation between agreement and realisation is small and the prediction is communicated.
Based on the grid status, the energy manager of a connection will supply more or less flexibility.
Distribution System Operator
Currently, grid operators know very little about their low voltage networks in terms of currents and voltages. The e-balance system provides the grid operator with the information required to provide insight into the LV grids, without needing additional sensors spread out into the grid. However, adding these sensors will improve the quality of the information about the grid. Our Batalha demonstrator will showcase such sensors in combination for gird management purposes.