Storage-Enabled Sustainable Energy for Buildings and Communities

Project Information

SENSIBLE

Grant agreement ID: 645963

DOI

10.3030/645963

Project closed

EC signature date 10 December 2014

Start date 1 January 2015

End date 31 December 2018

Funded under

• SOCIETAL CHALLENGES - Secure, clean and efficient energy

Total cost

€ 15 381 148,79

EU contribution

€ 11 842 396,76

Coordinated by

SIEMENS AKTIENGESELLSCHAFT
Germany

Periodic Reporting for period 3 - SENSIBLE (Storage-Enabled Sustainable Energy for Buildings and Communities)

Reporting period: 2018-01-01 to 2018-12-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Energy storage is expected to play an increasingly important role in the evolution of our energy system, particularly to accommodate increasing penetration of intermittent renewable energy resources and to improve electrical power system performance. Therefore, the overall objective of the project SENSIBLE was to develop, demonstrate, and evaluate a storage-enabled sustainable energy supply for buildings and communities.
The European Union has set ambitious goals for becoming a low-carbon economy, and in doing so making the energy supply sustainable, reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and limiting climate change (among others, GHG reduction by 40% by 2030 in comparison with 1990).
The SENSIBLE partners have worked together to demonstrate that the EU 2030 targets can be achieved on a local level by intelligent integration of a wide range of available small-scale storage technologies (electrochemical, thermal, heating, ventilation and air conditioning) into the local power distribution grid as well as into houses and commercial or industrial buildings.
The demonstration of efficient integration of storage devices-from electro-chemical to electro-thermal were done in demonstrators with complementary scope. In Nuremberg a temporary self-sufficiency of buildings equipped with local renewable or microgeneration, storage and a Building Energy Management System (BEMS) has been demonstrated. The underlying BEMS is able to manage the power at PCC with no power consumption or injection from /to the grid.
In Évora and Nottingham the residential home energy management solution was able to handle residential storage and flexible assets in an integrated way bridging the gap between citizens and energy markets.
Both in Nottingham and Évora electrochemical storage was integrated though power electronics. In Évora it was integrated with a retailer infrastructure enabling the provision of new energy services for customers and in Nottingham it was integrated to implement a local energy community.
In Évora high level tools were developed to optimize storage operation for grid operation purposes. Also at local level new control algorithms were developed on the top of a smartgrid infrastructure which enabled energy storage plus advance power electronics through advanced grid operation modes like islanding operation and this was done both at LV as well as MV level increasing grid reliability and resilience in case of extreme events.
As expected, the project has improved the innovation capacity of each partner and will create new knowledge strengthening the competitiveness and growth of the companies and institutions by developing innovations meeting the needs of European and global markets.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

Significant improvements were made in creating relevant technical and scientific outputs, whether at component or system level.

Hardware – Equipment and components:
The project tested different storage solutions and improvements in different power electronic equipment namely on inverters, battery management systems, data concentrators and communication gateways. The grid and residential energy storage systems were tested firstly in a controlled environment in order to check all the performance and safety tests. After these tests the grid, residential and building equipment was installed in the final location and the performance and compliance of all the systems were successfully validated onsite.

Management systems:
The consortium evaluated the performance of the developed systems (load, generation and flexibility forecasts; steady state and emergency operation regime; grid optimization, market mechanisms; building energy consumption optimization) in the demonstration activities making use of real and real time data of the three tests beds. A cost/benefit analysis for each system were conducted and the understanding of the road-to-market of the different solutions was perfomed.

Energy services:
As output the project does not only provide energy storage systems (including associated components) and energy management tools (forecast to grid, flexibility and market management). The demonstration of the several use cases ended in exploitable services that can be provided by or to energy aggregators, retailers, ESCOs, DSOs and other important stakeholders in the energy sector.

The two key exploitable outcomes can be summarized as follows:
-Concepts for integration and management of electrical and thermal storages in buildings, communities and power networks.
-Concepts about the flexibility market. New services for retailer and end users to optimize their market participation.

The achieved results from the demonstration activities and exploitable systems/knowledge were disseminated in several forums during 2018, from the academy to communities and industry.
The dissemination activities aimed to target various audiences and establish and strengthen a strong project identity from which the technical progress and its process were visible to and understandable by those outside the community including participants.
The main public interface was the website for the project, which was regularly reviewed and updated with technical and other highlights, such as conference attendances, publications and other activities.
Several community engagement events have been organised in Nottingham and Evora to coincide with the demonstrators “going live” in 2018. In addition, a major stake-holder engagement event was held in Nottingham in October 2018 to promote findings from SENSIBLE with the participation of all partners. This was quickly followed by providing a stall at the European Utility Week in Vienna, in November 2018 to promote the SENSIBLE project findings as part of the wider portfolio of projects in energy storage and community energy funded through the EU.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Beyond state-of-the-art energy market structures like datahubs were studied and potential solutions were prepared to support more efficient utilization of storage resources on different market levels.
Within SENSIBLE the development of energy management applications and client’s residential assets (e.g. smart meters, water heaters, home energy management systems, photovoltaics and residential energy storage system) contributed to energy price reduction. For example, in case of the Évora demonstrator several clients equipped with the above mentioned residential assets and its integrated management saved approximately 25€/month (-30 %) on their energy bills, and reduced their gas consumption. In this way significant savings in CO2 emissions could be demonstrated, i.e. 87 kg CO2/house during the project, corresponding to a reduction of 33%.
The multimodal BEMS for commercial buildings developed within the Nuremberg domonstrator enables to operate the building integrated electrical/thermal storages and other components (e.g. PV, heater, heating ventilation) in a most energy efficient way. Additionally it is able to participate in Day-Ahead and Balancing Power Markets minimizing in this way the energy procurement costs. Depending on the energy tariff, a cost saving potential of up to 31% has been determined. The results indicate the economic potential of maximizing building self-consumption while further decreasing total operation costs with proper sizing and selection of equipment. Especially with rising energy costs, self-consumption with optimal management can reduce risks as well as size of operating costs.

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