GOFLEX is a research and innovation project funded by the European Commission to make renewable energy more competitive. The European Union embraces the Paris Agreement on climate change by pledging to increase the share of renewable energy in Europe from 17% in 2016 to 27% by 2030. Reaching this goal requires accommodating more energy from intermittent renewable sources using existing physical infrastructure. Shifting toward renewables is technically challenging and expensive because today’s load patterns differ from today’s renewable generation patterns. Most people are not accustomed to or equipped for varying their energy usage based on how much the wind blows or the sun shines. One exception may be owners of solar panels or other energy resources scattered across the distribution grid. However, during periods of high sunshine these resources can create excess generation and overwhelm existing distribution grids designed for one-way flow of electricity. At present, the entities responsible for ensuring the safe and reliable operation of the grid, known as distribution system operators (DSOs), often intervene manually for lack of other choices to rectify undesirable conditions. GOFLEX changes this picture by introducing an innovative suite of technologies to automatically manage energy resources at the local level.
The GOFLEX suite of technologies manages energy production and consumption at the local level, from the bottom up. In so doing, the project invites consumers to participate actively in energy markets by offering---on a voluntary, consensual, remunerative, and automatic basis---to be flexible in their energy production and/or consumption. This flexibility, also known as demand-response, can help balance electricity supply with demand. By taking a bottom-up approach, GOFLEX makes demand-response more cost-effective and increases the level of demand-response available. We achieve this increase by introducing dynamic prices for and automatic trading of demand-response capacity. The possibility for automatic trading, including aggregating smaller amounts of demand-response, enables energy storage in physical processes such as heating and cooling. These processes can thus become virtual storage reservoirs. Managing flexible loads with a view to grid conditions requires systems capable of optimizing for local or grid-level conditions. Finally, DSOs need improved observability and manageability of the distribution grid to use demand-response in an optimal way. Improving observability requires grid and weather forecast data along with energy market data. The project concludes with three demonstrations where the GOFLEX integrated system has been deployed and evaluated. The demonstrations showed that this vision of an innovative, automatic, and flexible bottom-up energy system can safely increase the installed capacity of renewable energy sources by 20-60%.
