Efficient Allocation of Harvested Energy at the Edge by Building a Tangible Micro-Grid - The Texas Case

Efficient Allocation of Harvested Energy at the Edge by Building a Tangible Micro-Grid - The Texas Case

Kouvelas, N. (TU Delft Embedded Systems)
Venkatesha Prasad, Ranga Rao (TU Delft Embedded Systems)

2021

The electricity grid, using Information and Communication Technology, is transformed into Smart Grid (SG), which is highly efficient and responsive, promoting two-way energy and information flow between energy-distributors and consumers. Many consumers are becoming prosumers by also harvesting energy. The trend is to form small communities of consumers/prosumers, leading to Micro-grids (MG) to manage energy locally. MGs are parts of SG that decentralize the energy flow, allocating the excess of harvested energy within the community. Energy allocation amongst them must solve certain issues viz., 1) balancing supply/demand within MGs; 2) how allocating energy to a user affects his/her community; and 3) what are the economic benefits for users. To address these issues, we propose six Energy Allocation Strategies (EASs) for MGs - ranging from simple to optimal and their combinations. We maximize the usage of harvested energy within the MG. We form household-groups sharing similar characteristics to apply EASs by analyzing energy and socioeconomic data thoroughly. We propose four evaluation metrics and evaluate our EASs on data acquired from 443 households over a year. By prioritizing specific households, we increase the number of fully served households to 81% compared to random sharing. By combining EASs, we boost the social welfare parameter by 49%.

clustering
energy allocation strategies
game theory
harvested energy
Micro-girds
social welfare
water filling

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:9463c4e3-0f25-4949-bb88-224d6d85a0c5

https://doi.org/10.1109/TGCN.2020.3047432

2021-11-29

IEEE Transactions on Green Communications and Networking, 5 (1), 94-105

Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.

Institutional Repository

journal article

© 2021 N. Kouvelas, Ranga Rao Venkatesha Prasad