A few months ago we were contacted by Mathias Dalheimer a.k.a. gonium of Fraunhofer ITWM in Kaiserslautern. He told us they were planning to implement and trial a demand-side management platform. Unlike other initiatives in this domain, they want this platform to be based on open-source components to facilitate a bottom-up movement in energy management. Hence the mySmartGrid project name. People attending the Flukso talk at FOSDEM X have already received an introduction to mySmartGrid by Mathias. Here's a summary of what was said during the talk:
Renewable energy sources allow a carbon-neutral production of electrical energy. Unfortunately, energy sources like photovoltaics and wind power depend on weather conditions and fluctuate over time. At the same time, it is not feasible to store electricity in order to compensate for this. In Germany, wind parks need to be shut down from time to time because they produce too much electricity that is not needed in the grid.
There are two ways of dealing with this: Either one develops methods to store electrical energy, or one changes the demand for electrical energy. The latter is what we do in the mySmartGrid project. We want to increase the usage of renewable energy sources by shifting the use of electricity to times when there is plenty of renewable electricity. The idea is to shift electrical loads like freezers and heat pumps. These devices do not need user interaction like washing machines. For example, we can turn on the heat pump during the night when there is plenty of wind energy. During daytime the heat pump consumes less energy. In total, the percentage of power from renewable sources will be increased.
The mySmartGrid project consists of three steps:
(1) Measure and Understand. We want to equip up to 1000 households in Kaiserslautern with Fluksometers and Chumbies. The Flukso measures household electricity consumption, while we use the Chumby as a local interface for showing this resource consumption. The data collected by the Flukso technology is sensitive since it is possible to infer a lot about the people living in the households. We want to adress this by providing solid privacy settings. We also allow users to purge their data from our servers.
(2) A control daemon will be installed on the Chumbies. We connect the Chumby with the switchable devices using digitalStrom technology. The idea is to have local control over what we want to regulate. The Chumby retrieves a schedule once per day and decides locally how to enforce this schedule. It is always possible for household members to override the Chumby's decisions. Once a local schedule has been made the heat pumps and freezers are switched using small adapters. The adapters are controlled over digitalStrom. Bart will help us build a Flukso-to-digitalStrom-Gateway right into the Fluksometer.
(3) In the last step we aggregate the devices installed in the 1000 households. By shifting loads in these households we have reasonable load shifting potential that has a commercial value. We will form a collective and attempt to sell the shifting potential to local energy companies.
All components (except for digitalStrom) will be available as open-source software and hardware. Our goal is to create tools that allow everyone to form local movements and increase the percentage of renewable energy in the electric power grid. We are open for additional ideas and will tightly work with the Flukso community.