Intelligent technology for optimised energy management in cities
A major requirement for smart cities is to leverage energy consumption between the different producers and consumers (prosumers). This in turn will lead to a reduction in the pollution generated by today’s cities and emerging megacities. To fully understand the complex interaction between a city and its energy management systems, together with grids, buildings, supply technologies and consumers, it is crucial to unlock the full potential of smart grids. A more holistic approach that focuses on the interaction of all system elements is needed. The EU-funded SCANERGY(opens in new window) (A scalable & modular system for energy trading between prosumers) project has developed a scalable and modular system that enables efficient and distributed energy exchange between prosumers. Combining existing and new ICT modules, the system offers scalability and robustness to accommodate the growing need for an intelligent decision-support system that manages the renewable energy market. It allows individual prosumers to collectively reduce their dependency on the main grid by trading locally produced renewable energy between dwellings. The system includes an integration layer for currently available energy infrastructures, enabling near-real-time coordinated control of a city’s produced and consumed energy. The software modules implement online and offline simulation and prediction models, as well as optimisation algorithms that leverage more effective and rational use of all resources available to a city. Project partners devised methods to enable the distributed cooperation between energy prosumers. The objective was to better understand how such cooperation can be encouraged between individuals and how to organise this collaboration in the energy sector towards a commercial product. A commercial energy management platform facilitates more efficient renewable energy use, reduces greenhouse gas emissions and improves indoor air quality. An integrated computational management unit exploits all data and information available in real time for existing urban energy management systems. SCANERGY successfully addressed the problem of decentralised smart energy trade. Its innovations will permit individual users, neighbourhoods and cities to cooperate, coordinate and communicate in achieving common energy management goals.
