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This study presents Integrid's project framework to manage low voltage (LV) electrical networks, aiming to avoid both technical and quality constraints, induced by the ever-increasing amount of flexible resources spread all over the grid. These assets cover a large amount of renewable-based energy generation to electrical vehicles and energy storage units. For this to be possible, new advanced tools were developed to exploit the benefits of the so-called distributed energy resources, while overcoming limitations on the metering and communication infrastructures. Hence, this study describes the approach taken to perform the active management of LV networks, without a perfect level of observability, exploiting the flexibility provided by the distribution system operator's resources combined with the one offered by private consumers through the home energy management systems. Additionally, some results followed by a brief discussion are presented, enforcing the success of the developed tools. The algorithms within these tools allow to forecast both microgeneration, available flexibility and load profiles, as well as to estimate the network's state, at different time frames.

The modern digital era is characterized by a plethora of emerging technologies, methodologies and techniques that are employed in the manufacturing industries with intent to improve productivity, to optimize processes and to reduce operational costs. Yet, algorithms and methodological approaches for improvement of energy consumption and environmental impact are not integrated with the current operational and planning tools used by manufacturing companies. One possible reason for this is the difficulty in bridging the gap between the most advanced energy related ICT tools, developed within the scope of the industry 4.0 era, and the legacy systems that support most manufacturing operational and planning processes. Consequently, this paper proposes a conceptual architecture model for a digital energy management platform, which is comprised of an IIoT-based platform, strongly supported by energy digital twin for interoperability and integrated with AI-based energy data-driven services. This conceptual architecture model enables companies to analyse their energy consumption behaviour, which allows for the understanding of the synergies among the variables that affect the energy demand, and to integrate this energy intelligence with their legacy systems in order to achieve a more sustainable energy demand.

Forecasting has always been at the forefront of decision making and planning. The uncertainty that surrounds the future is both exciting and challenging, with individuals and organisations seeking to minimise risks and maximise utilities. The large number of forecasting applications calls for a diverse set of forecasting methods to tackle real-life challenges. This article provides a non-systematic review of the theory and the practice of forecasting. We provide an overview of a wide range of theoretical, state-of-the-art models, methods, principles, and approaches to prepare, produce, organise, and evaluate forecasts. We then demonstrate how such theoretical concepts are applied in a variety of real-life contexts. We do not claim that this review is an exhaustive list of methods and applications. However, we wish that our encyclopedic presentation will offer a point of reference for the rich work that has been undertaken over the last decades, with some key insights for the future of forecasting theory and practice. Given its encyclopedic nature, the intended mode of reading is non-linear. We offer cross-references to allow the readers to navigate through the various topics. We complement the theoretical concepts and applications covered by large lists of free or open-source software implementations and publicly-available databases. Coordenacao de Aperfeicoamento de Pessoal de Nivel Superior (CAPES)001 Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Cientifico e Tecnologico (CNPQ)307403/2019-0 CA19130 ECO2017-87245-R SBPLY/19/180501/000151 info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion

One of the major barriers for the retailers is to understand the consumption elasticity they can expect from their contracted demand response (DR) clients. The current trend of DR products provided by retailers are not consumer-specific, which poses additional barriers for the active engagement of consumers in these programs. The elasticity of consumers demand behavior varies from individual to individual. The utility will benefit from knowing more accurately how changes in its prices will modify the consumption pattern of its clients. This work proposes a functional model for the consumption elasticity of the DR contracted consumers. The model aims to determine the load adjustment the DR consumers can provide to the retailers or utilities for different price levels. The proposed model uses a Bayesian probabilistic approach to identify the actual load adjustment an individual contracted client can provide for different price levels it can experience. The developed framework provides the retailers or utilities with a tool to obtain crucial information on how an individual consumer will respond to different price levels. This approach is able to quantify the likelihood with which the consumer reacts to a DR signal and identify the actual load adjustment an individual contracted DR client provides for different price levels they can experience. This information can be used to maximize the control and reliability of the services the retailer or utility can offer to the System Operators., 28 pages, 19 figures, journal paper - Elsevier: Energy & Buildings

Distribution system operators (DSO) are currently moving towards active distribution grid management. One goal is the development of tools for operational planning of flexibility from distributed energy resources (DER) in order to solve potential (predicted) congestion and voltage problems. This work proposes an innovative flexibility management function based on stochastic and chance-constrained optimization that copes with forecast uncertainty from renewable energy sources (RES). Furthermore, the model allows the decision-maker to integrate its attitude towards risk by considering a trade-off between operating costs and system reliability. RES forecast uncertainty is modeled through spatial-temporal trajectories or ensembles. An AC-OPF linearization that approximates the actual behavior of the system is included, ensuring complete convexity of the problem. McCormick and big-M relaxation methods are compared to reformulate the chance-constrained optimization problem. The discussion and comparison of the proposed models is carried out through a case study based on actual generation data, where operating costs, system reliability and computer performance are evaluated.

This paper presents a new method to identify classes of events, by processing phasor measurement units (PMU) frequency data through deep neural networks. Deep tapered Multi-layer Perceptrons of the half-autoencoder type, Deep Belief Networks and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) are compared, using real data from Brazil. A sound success is obtained by a transformation of time-domain signals, from dynamic events recorded, into 2D images; these images wee processed with a CNN, taking advantage of the strong dependency existing among neighboring pixels in images. The training, computing and processing was achieved with a GPU (Graphics Processing Unit), allowing speeding-up of the process up to 30 times and rendering the process suitable to increase the online situational awareness of network operators.

This paper analyzes the activation of the manual balancing reserve of the Portuguese system and its prices for the period 2015-2017. Standard, logistic and LASSO regression models, causal analysis based on Bayesian networks and random forests are applied. Results show that the variables that better explain the activation of the manual reserve are the imbalances of both renewable generation and demand, but surprisingly forecasted with persistence models based on the last verified measurements (available 15 minutes before the reserve activation), instead of using more elaborated models based on production forecasts. Prices, however, are harder to explain suggesting the need for additional information, such as bidding prices not used in this study.

One key strategy to fight climate change worldwide is to invest in renewable energy sources (RES) and increase their integration into the power system. In recent years, we observed how extreme weather conditions, together with growing penetration levels of RES, are increasingly affecting the power system operation and planning, as well as electricity markets. The inherent uncertainty of such events and the associated uncertainty in the power generation from RES can no longer be ignored by the energy industry. In other words, current deterministic methods have reached their limit due to the inherent inability to model and convey forecast uncertainties.Probabilistic information and forecasts have been shown to improve decision-making in many weather-related processes. By dealing with uncertainties, the end-user takes responsibility, but also gets the possibility to harvest the benefits of knowing and being able to calculate what is at stake. Last but not least, knowing the uncertainty of an event in advance opens the possibility to act upon such uncertainty rather than acting on the event itself and thereby mitigating costly side effects or being able to secure safety.In 2020, the IEA Wind Task 36 “Wind Energy Forecasting” has for this reason started an initiative “Probabilistic Forecasting Games and Experiments” in collaboration with the Max-Planck Institute for Human Development. The main goal of this initiative is to empirically investigate the psychological barriers to the adoption of probabilistic forecasts and to enable stakeholders to understand and explore their benefit and use. With the initiative, the IEA Wind Task 36 wants to establish interdisciplinary teams to promote testing and playing with forecast games and experiments to give end-users a “feel” of where the hidden possibilities are to improve decisions and developers a platform to:Discuss Educate Inspire the energy and meteorology community for the development, deployment and communication of uncertainties of weather and energy forecasts to end-users for better decision making.The task leaders have started to setup a platform with a list of forecasting games and experiments developed by the task, in cooperation or by cooperating institutions, researchers or companies as well as invite others outside the tasks community to share links or data to games and experiments.The initiative will be presented and the first experience with the task’s own games and experiments briefly discussed. The many open questions and considerations when looking forward towards the establishment of training and educational tools for probabilistic forecasts will be formulated and posed to the meteorological and psychological/behaviorism research community to enhance the collaboration and establish a stronger link for this interdiciplinary work.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) Wind Task 36 on Wind Power Forecasting organises international collaboration, among national weather centres with an interest and/or large projects on wind forecast improvements (NOAA, DWD, ...), forecast vendors and forecast users to facilitate scientific exchange to be prepared for future challenges.The talk discusses the general setup of the Task, and the latest developments. Among those are decision making under uncertainty. To this aim, a series of forecasting experiments are being developed and one initial experiment was tested by a wide audience. The forecasting experiments took the form of a game, during which the participants could experience the benefit of probabilistic information on their decisions to trade. Other results include an information portal for meteorological data, and the IEA Recommended Practice for Forecast Solution Selection which is divided into 3 parts: (1) "Forecast Solution Selection Process", (2) "Designing and Executing Forecasting Benchmarks and Trials", and (3) "Evaluation of Forecasts and Forecast Solutions". The Recommended Practice guideline encourages forecast users to establish a framework of metrics that help identify, whether the user's forecast performance criteria effectively incentivize the forecast provider to optimize towards the forecast target variable that has the most value for the user's application(s). For this year, we intend to update the guideline in the light of the experiences throughout the industry in its initial application, and after collecting this experience at 3 Open Space workshops.Collaboration is open to IEA Wind member states; 12 countries are already actively collaborating.The Task is divided in three work packages: Work Package (WP) 1 is a collaboration on the improvement of the scientific basis for the wind predictions themselves. This includes numerical weather prediction (NWP) model physics, but also widely distributed information on accessible datasets. This WP also currently organises a benchmark for NWP models, based on the Wind Forecast Improvement Project 2 (WFIP2) datasets. WP2 deals with the power conversion from the wind speed forecasts and the associated vendor issues. Amongst other things, WP2 published the IEA Recommended Practice on how to select an optimal wind power forecast solution for a specific application. The focus of WP3 is on the engagement of end users to disseminate the best practice in the use of wind power predictions, especially probabilistic forecasts and also what kind of measurements are required in real-time environmentsA major activity of the Task is the organisation of workshops and special sessions at conferences, like this one. Previous workshops on e.g. forecasting on the minute scale including lidars, a workshop on the value of forecasts, or special sessions on the Wind Energy Science Conference, the Wind Integration Workshop, the ESIG Meteorology and Market Design for Grid Services workshops are still visible online from the IEAWindForecasting YouTube channel.

Geographically distributed wind turbines, photovoltaic panels and sensors (e.g., pyranometers) produce large volumes of data that can be used to improve renewable energy forecasting skill. However, data owners may be unwilling to share their data, even if privacy is ensured, due to a form of prisoner's dilemma: all could benefit from data sharing, but in practice no one is willing to do do. Our proposal hence consists of a data marketplace, to incentivize collaboration between different data owners through the monetization of data.We adapt here an existing auction mechanism to the case of renewable energy forecasting data. It accommodates the temporal nature of the data, i.e., lagged time-series act as covariates and models are updated continuously using a sliding window. A test case with wind energy data is presented to illustrate and assess the effectiveness of such data markets. All agents (or data owners) are shown to benefit in terms of higher revenue resulting from the combination of electricity and data markets. The results support the idea that data markets can be a viable solution to promote data exchange between renewable energy agents and contribute to reducing system imbalance costs.

This paper proposes a Local Energy Market using a P2P blockchain-powered marketplace where agents bilaterally trade energy after the consumption and production period, and not before, as usual in electricity market design. The EU and MIBEL regulatory framework for Renewable Energy Communities potentially creates space for such a market, but some improvements in the settlement procedures and agent’s participation must be met.

International audience; This paper presents a study on dynamic line rating (DLR) forecasting procedure aimed at developing a new methodology able to forecast future ampacity values for rare and extreme events. This is motivated by the belief that to apply DLR network operators must be able to forecast their values and this must be based on conservative approaches able to guarantee the safe operation of the network. The proposed methodology can be summarised as follows: firstly, probabilistic forecasts of conductors' ampacity are calculated with a non-parametric model, secondly, the lower part of the distribution is replaced with a new distribution calculated with a parametric model. The paper presents also an evaluation of the proposed methodology in network operation, suggesting an application method and highlighting the advantages. The proposed forecasting methodology delivers a high improvement of the lowest quantiles' reliability, allowing perfect reliability for the 1% quantile and a reduction of roughly 75% in overconfidence for the 0.1% quantile.

The aim of this paper is to present the objectives, research directions and first highlight results of the Smart4RES project, which was launched in November 2019, under the Horizon 2020 Framework Programme. Smart4RES is a research project that aims to bring substantial performance improvements to the whole model and value chain in renewable energy (RES) forecasting, with particular emphasis placed on optimizing synergies with storage and to support power system operation and participation in electricity markets. For that, it concentrates on a number of disruptive proposals to support ambitious objectives for the future of renewable energy forecasting. This is thought of in a context with steady increase in the quantity of data being collected and computational capabilities. And, this comes in combination with recent advances in data science and approaches to meteorological forecasting. Smart4RES concentrates on novel developments towards very high-resolution and dedicated weather forecasting solutions. It makes optimal use of varied and distributed sources of data e.g. remote sensing (sky imagers, satellites, etc), power and meteorological measurements, as well as high-resolution weather forecasts, to yield high-quality and seamless approaches to renewable energy forecasting. The project accommodates the fact that all these sources of data are distributed geographically and in terms of ownership, with current restrictions preventing sharing. Novel alternative approaches are to be developed and evaluated to reach optimal forecast accuracy in that context, including distributed and privacy-preserving learning and forecasting methods, as well as the advent of platform-enabled data-markets, with associated pricing strategies. Smart4RES places a strong emphasis on maximizing the value from the use of forecasts in applications through advanced decision making and optimization approaches. This also goes through approaches to streamline the definition of new forecasting products balancing the complexity of forecast information and the need of forecast users. Focus is on developing models for applications involving storage, the provision of ancillary services, as well as market participation.

Forecasting for wind and solar renewable energy is becoming more important as the amount of energy generated from these sources increases. Forecast skill is improving, but so too is the way forecasts are being used. In this paper, we present a brief overview of the state-of-the-art of forecasting wind and solar energy. We describe approaches in statistical and physical modeling for time scales from minutes to days ahead, for both deterministic and probabilistic forecasting. Our focus changes then to consider the future of forecasting for renewable energy. We discuss recent advances which show potential for great improvement in forecast skill. Beyond the forecast itself, we consider new products which will be required to aid decision making subject to risk constraints. Future forecast products will need to include probabilistic information, but deliver it in a way tailored to the end user and their specific decision making problems. Businesses operating in this sector may see a change in business models as more people compete in this space, with different combinations of skills, data and modeling being required for different products. The transaction of data itself may change with the adoption of blockchain technology, which could allow providers and end users to interact in a trusted, yet decentralized way. Finally, we discuss new industry requirements and challenges for scenarios with high amounts of renewable energy. New forecasting products have the potential to model the impact of renewables on the power system, and aid dispatch tools in guaranteeing system security. This article is categorized under: Energy Infrastructure > Systems and Infrastructure Wind Power > Systems and Infrastructure Photovoltaics > Systems and Infrastructure. Science Foundation Ireland Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia

The need to take into account and explicitly model forecast uncertainty is today at the heart of many scientific and applied enterprises. For instance, the ever-increasing accuracy of weather forecasts has been driven by the development of ensemble forecasts, where a large number of forecasts are generated either by generating forecasts from different models or by repeatedly perturbing the initial conditions of a single forecast model. Importantly, this approach provides robust estimates of forecast uncertainty, which supports human judgement and decision-making. Although weather forecasts and their uncertainty are also crucial for the weather-to-power conversion for RES forecasting in system operation, power trading and balancing, the industry has been reluctant to adopt ensemble methods and other new technologies that can help manage highly variable and uncertain power feed-ins, especially under extreme weather conditions. In order to support the energy industry in the adaptation of uncertainty forecasts into their business practices, the IEA Wind Task 36 has started an initiative in collaboration with the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and Hans-Ertel Center for Weather Research to investigate the existing barriers in the industry to the adoption of such forecasts into decision processes. In the first part of the initiative, a forecast game was designed as a demonstration of a typical decision-making task in the power industry. The game was introduced in an IEA Wind Task 36 workshop and thereafter released to the public. When closed, it had been played by 120 participants. We will discuss the results of our first experience with the experiment and introduce some new features of the second generation of experiments as a continuation of the initiative. We will also discuss specific questions that emerged when we started and after analysing the experiments. Lastly we will discuss the trends we found and how we will fit these into the overall objective of the initiative which is to provide training tools to demonstrate the use and benefit of uncertainty forecasts by simulating decision scenarios with feedback and allowing people to learn from experience, rather than reading articles, how to use such forecasts.

Variable-speed pump power storage is an innovative large-scale technology that is being deployed across the world. In addition to price arbitrage and provision of downward replacement reserve, its operational flexibility enables the provision of frequency restoration reserve (FRR) both in turbine and pump modes. This work proposes a bidding optimization strategy for the participation in the FRR market. The proposed framework encompasses a medium-term module to optimally allocate the yearly natural water inflows, representation of electrical and hydraulic losses in the water inflow/power curves, as well as forecasting techniques to predict market prices and natural water inflows. Moreover, it does not assume prior knowledge of the amount of activated FRR capacity band. An evaluation module is also proposed to replicate the “real” operation of the power plant and enables an accurate calculation of the revenue. A comparison between fixed and variable-speed Pump storage power (PSP) units participating in the Iberian electricity market presented an increase in revenue of almost 12%. Due to the low liquidity of the FRR market in Portugal, and the considerable capacity of the PSP unit, under some specific situations, it might be necessary to cap the size of the FRR bid to decrease the difference between the expected and realized revenue.