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Home Energy Management Systems (HEMSs) help households tailor their electricity usage based on power system signals such as energy prices. This technology helps to reduce energy bills and offers greater demand-side flexibility that supports the power system stability. However, residents who lack a technical background may find it difficult to use HEMSs effectively, because HEMSs require well-formatted parameterization that reflects the characteristics of the energy resources, houses, and users' needs. Recently, Large-Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated an outstanding ability in language understanding. Motivated by this, we propose an LLM-based interface that interacts with users to understand and parameterize their ``badly-formatted answers'', and then outputs well-formatted parameters to implement an HEMS. We further use Reason and Act method (ReAct) and few-shot prompting to enhance the LLM performance. Evaluating the interface performance requires multiple user--LLM interactions. To avoid the efforts in finding volunteer users and reduce the evaluation time, we additionally propose a method that uses another LLM to simulate users with varying expertise, ranging from knowledgeable to non-technical. By comprehensive evaluation, the proposed LLM-based HEMS interface achieves an average parameter retrieval accuracy of 88\%, outperforming benchmark models without ReAct and/or few-shot prompting., Comment: 13 pages conference paper

Many real-world decision-making problems in energy systems, transportation, and finance have uncertain parameters in their constraints. Wasserstein distributionally robust joint chance constraints (WDRJCC) offer a promising solution by explicitly guaranteeing the probability of the simultaneous satisfaction of multiple constraints. WDRJCC are computationally demanding, and although manageable for small problems, practical applications often demand more tractable approaches -- especially for large-scale and complex problems, such as power system unit commitment problems and multilevel problems with chance-constrained lower levels. To address this, this paper proposes a novel inner-approximation for a specific type of WDRJCC, namely WDRJCC with right-hand-side uncertainties (RHS-WDRJCC). We propose a Strengthened and Faster Linear Approximation (SFLA) by strengthening an existing convex inner-approximation that is equivalent to the worst-case conditional value-at-risk (W-CVaR) method under specific hyperparameters. This strengthening process reduces the number of constraints and tightens the feasible region for ancillary variables, leading to significant computational speedup. Despite the tightening, we prove that the proposed SFLA does not introduce additional conservativeness and can even lead to less conservativeness. The significance and superiority of the proposed SFLA are validated in two important real-world problems. In a power system unit commitment problem, the proposed SFLA achieves up to 10x and on average 3.8x computational speedup compared to the strengthened and exact mixed-integer reformulation in finding comparable high-quality feasible solutions. In a bilevel strategic bidding problem where the exact reformulation is not applicable due to non-convexity, we show that the proposed SFLA can lead to 90x speedup compared to existing convex approximation methods such as W-CVaR.

The evolving energy landscape has propelled energy communities to the forefront of modern energy management. However, existing research has yet to explore the potential synergies between data centres and energy communities, necessitating an assessment on their collective capabilities for cost efficiency, waste heat optimisation, and market participation. This paper presents a mixed integer linear programming model to assess the collaborative performance of energy communities, data centres and energy markets. The evaluation focuses on the efficient use of waste heat and the flexibility of job scheduling while minimising system energy costs and maintaining quality of service requirements for data centres. Our results, based on realistic profiles of an energy community and a data centre, showcase significant benefits of these synergies, with a 38% reduction in operating costs and an 87% decrease in heat demand., Comment: Accepted at IEEE PES ISGT Europe 2024

The recent growth of Artificial Intelligence (AI), particularly large language models, requires energy-demanding high-performance computing (HPC) data centers, which poses a significant burden on power system capacity. Scheduling data center computing jobs to manage power demand can alleviate network stress with minimal infrastructure investment and contribute to fast time-scale power system balancing. This study, for the first time, comprehensively analyzes the capability and cost of grid flexibility provision by GPU-heavy AI-focused HPC data centers, along with a comparison with CPU-heavy general-purpose HPC data centers traditionally used for scientific computing. A data center flexibility cost model is proposed that accounts for the value of computing. Using real-world computing traces from 7 AI-focused HPC data centers and 7 general-purpose HPC data centers, along with computing prices from 3 cloud platforms, we find that AI-focused HPC data centers can offer greater flexibility at 50% lower cost compared to general-purpose HPC data centers for a range of power system services. By comparing the cost to flexibility market prices, we illustrate the financial profitability of flexibility provision for AI-focused HPC data centers. Finally, our flexibility and cost estimates can be scaled using parameters of other data centers through algebraic operations, avoiding the need for re-optimization., Comment: The supplementary datasets are available at Zenodo: https://zenodo.org/records/14454915

The growing demand for electrified heating, electrified transportation, and power-intensive data centres challenge distribution networks. If electrification projects are carried out without considering electrical distribution infrastructure, there could be unexpected blackouts and financial losses. Datasets containing real-world distribution network information are required to address this. On the other hand, social data, such as household heating composition, are closely coupled with people's lives. Studying the coupling between the energy system and society is important in promoting social welfare. To fill these gaps, this paper introduces two datasets. The first is the main dataset for the distribution networks in Great Britain (GB), collecting information on firm capacity, peak demands, locations, and parent transmission nodes (the Grid Supply Point, namely GSP) for all primary substations (PSs). PSs are a crucial part of the UK distribution network and are at the lowest voltage level (11 kV) with publicly available data for most UK Distribution Network Operators (DNOs). Substation firm capacity and peak demand facilitate an understanding of the remaining room of the existing network. The parent GSP information helps link the dataset of distribution networks to datasets of transmission networks. The second dataset extends the main network dataset, linking each PS to information about the number of households that use different types of central heating recorded in census data. The derivation of the second dataset is based on locations of PSs collected in the main dataset with appropriate assumptions. The derivation process may also be replicated to integrate other social datasets., Comment: Submitted to the journal "Data in Brief"