Smart Community Neighborhood - driven by energy informatics

The current electricity infrastructure in Norway lacks mechanisms for handling mass and concentrated energy demand primarily led by EVs charging requirements. Data-driven decentralized energy systems can address this gap through connection of household RES (Renewable Energy Sources) to the grid. However, this would disrupt the existing simple supply-demand market relationship between producers and customers. This project focuses on the development of mechanisms which will allow prosumers to share information about their production and consumption behavior. It creates a decentralized virtual neighborhood where each household operates autonomously and trades energy with other households and communities, in which case, the central authority or the main grid only act as a facilitator. Such mechanisms will be particularly applicable for fluctuating loads and solving congestion problems. The project aims to achieve this with ICT based smart-solutions. Machine learning based methods are used to learn and predict household production and consumption behavior. Incentive systems for energy trading are facilitated through the use of blockchains. Furthermore, edge and fog computing drive energy information solutions. Finally, all technical components are driven by data privacy and security elements. The project funds seven PhDs who have continued analysis and proposals of research methods. The goal is to design and implement a local energy trading platform such that local renewable energy producers or prosumers can sell energy to their neighbours in a simple and efficient way. The project focuses on the detailed design of an energy trading mechanism for community microgrids. The trading platform will be based on blockchain technology for the purpose of enabling distributed peer-to-peer (P2P) trading scheme. The past reporting period was challenging for many of the PhDs with restrictions in place due to Covid-19. Several students had their research stays abroad canceled and their studies interrupted. Others needed to take time off due to illness, with another on maternity leave. However, despite these challenges, many were able to publish quality results to online conferences. Additionally, half of the PhDs completed their theses and defended their dissertation even during these challenging times. Physical meetings were planned, but had to be moved online. An online project meeting with all the stakeholders was also held during this reporting period. Several of the PhDs were able to participate in a physical summer school closely related to the project. To date, the project has produced several high quality publications and several more are already submitted and waiting for evaluation. Finally, one patent has been granted in USA for her innovation.

All PhDs are expected on-time (extensions are granted in Oslo due to additional work task related to teaching duty). They all found jobs in the relevant industry in companies like (DNV, Accenture, etc). One patent has been granted in USA under the verification and commercialisation process.

The current electricity infrastructure lacks mechanisms to handle mass and concentrated energy demands primarily led by Electric Vehicles (EV) charging requirements. A potential mechanism to handle such surges during peak consumption hours without restructuring the grid is through integration of renewable micro energy sources at household or neighborhood levels. It becomes necessary to efficiently harness the potential of prosumers and develop tools to efficiently manage household/neighborhood energy production and consumption. Mechanisms are needed to pool upon the combined micro energy sources, integrate community level power storage units, predict production and consumption and allow sharing/trading of energy between households, neighborhoods and communities. ICT based smart-solutions can be used to substantially address and resolve such challenges. Data driven decentralized energy systems can disrupt the existing simplex supply-demand market relationship between producers and customer. With supporting environment-friendly energy production and storage technologies, conventional end customers will be able to produce clean energy locally (e.g. solar energy micro-generation). It would allow them to either meet their own requirements or sell it back to the grid. Meanwhile, the EV batteries could also be added as additional resource to the local energy storage systems. Such resources will be able to store locally generated power and have the capability to spontaneously participate in balancing consumption fluctuations. It will be particularly applicable for fluctuating intensive loads (e.g. heating, charging) and to solve congestion problems.