DEZENT: A Completely Distributed Power Management and Distribution System for Renewable Energy

Over the past few years, renewable energy (from sun, wind, or water power) has rapidly advanced as a economical and ecological factor, within the European Union and even world-wide. The production facilities (e.g. solar panels, wind or water power turbines) are typically widely distributed and are in the low-to-medium power range. While the traditional power distribution structure is organized in a top-down manner this is inadequate and more than inefficient for renewable energy. In the seminar the DEZENT will be presented where power management, distribution, and “market” negotiations are handled through bottom-up control. In order to cope with the high amount of unpredictability of the regenerative sources we manage to do the whole business of negotiating, power distribution, grid stability checking and/or redistributing power flows within intervals (periods) of 0,5 sec, independent of the number of customers involved. (Keeping this rather tight deadline allows to assume that the negotiation situation, i.e. for demand and supply, is constant in the meantime.) The customer agents frequently adapt their strategies through distributed collaborative learning procedures (tailored Reinforcement Learning). Reserve energy needed for peak demand situations can be kept to a minimum because smart meters – as part of smart consumer facilities - would be utilized to dynamically make use of “conditional” consumers whereas in peak supply situations excessive power would be fed into large stationary batteries or grid-connected e-vehicles. The emphasis of the talk will be on the technical context. Also steps into the future will be indicated.