George Konstanopolous, Elena Gaura, Nandor Verba and Pablo Rodolfo Baldivieso Monasterios, EnergyREV's Cyber-physical Advances WP.
Over the past few months EnergyREV researchers from Coventry and Sheffield Universities who specialise in cyber-physical advances have been working with the design team of the ‘Advanced multi-Energy management and oPTimisation time shifting platform (ADEPT)’ demonstrator (https://www.infiniterenewables.com/adept-microgrid/) to extend its smart features and capabilities.
The ADEPT system is located in Ebbw Vale, South Wales and consists of a wind turbine, a hybrid-battery storage and a photovoltaic solar system with an industrial load (GS Yuasa Battery site). The system is integrated within a micro-grid to investigate the potential to maximise the utilisation of clean and cheap electricity for the benefits of the local consumers. Information from renewable energy resources generation and consumption is gathered at the Sheffield University laboratory, where the remote control and monitoring system has been set up.
A thorough review of the original ADEPT demonstrator has been carried out by the EnergyREV team and a detailed plan for extending the existing monitoring, communication, control and intelligent decision-making capabilities of the system was proposed. This will enhance the ADEPT demonstrators’ flexibility and help pave the way towards scale-up of the system.
Initial work to extend ADEPT was undertaken in November, where the Sheffield University monitoring system was connected to a flexible digital-framework device developed at Coventry University that imitates two virtual domestic consumers. This extension demonstrates how the ADEPT system can incorporate more consumers into its existing micro-grid infrastructure and how the intelligent monitoring and decision-making mechanisms can handle multiple consumers for future expansion scenarios.
The virtual system, developed at Coventry University, can not only interact with the physical devices in Sheffield, but also enables a secure and reliable connection with the ’agent-based’ testing facility, currently being designed by University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. This facility will demonstrate how ‘agent-based’ approaches can be used to support the existing controllers at each of the distributed generation unit - wind turbine, battery storage and solar system - to enable seamless integration of additional renewable energy units in the ADEPT infrastructure in the near future.
This work will prove that it is possible to establish links between the three different elements of control, monitoring and simulation which are located in the geographically dispersed cities of Sheffield, Coventry and Glasgow. These are collecting and analysing data from the ADEPT demonstrator located in South Wales. This will enable the EnergyREV cyber-physical advances team to investigate where new components and units, including different renewables and consumers, can be added without the need to reconfigure the entire system which is time consuming and expensive.
Future work will focus on offline analysis of the hybrid-battery storage system to allow accurate modelling its characteristics, as well as the design of a unified communication protocol within the ADEPT system in South Wales which will achieve improved monitoring and optimal power management; thus further enhancing the system intelligence.
The EnergyREV team would like to thank the ADEPT team for their time and for letting them work together on their interesting Smart Local Energy System.