ENTRY - Management of Distributed Energy Systems

The basic idea of a distributed simulation environment has been presented and elaborated in a new context, in which building energy simulators and district heating network simulator are hydraulically and thermally linked from the power plant via the district heating network to the internal room conditions in buildings. The models and software employed in this task were either developed originally or reshaped and adapted within the frames of this project. An economical evaluation tool was developed and analysis was carried out considering different heating systems operated in a group of houses connected to a district heating network. Heat trading was evaluated as a new business concept, which assumes that small scale producers are allowed to connect the network, and it was found technologically feasible. However, a transition from the current monopolistic business environment to a new and liberated heat market is a prerequisite. A model for a selected distributed co generation technology, solid oxide fuel cell system, has been created and integrated with building simulation software. The ICT-architecture was defined to assure the stability of the distributed simulation environment. Considerable effort was spent to sustain a generic approach when defining the requirements. The main delivery of the project is an alpha-prototype of a software tool capable of performing the challenging task of simulating operation of the whole energy supply chain simultaneously. As far as we are aware, this has not been achieved anywhere else. Limited results obtained so far confirm the applicability of the approach. Test cases demonstrated that the convergence control is the critical part of the architecture.