MindSphere – IoT Revolution in the energy world

MindSphere is the cloud-based, open IoT operating system from Siemens that connects real things to the digital world, and enables powerful applications and digital services to drive business success. MindSphere’s open Platform as a Service (PaaS) enables a rich partner ecosystem to develop and deliver new applications.

Digitization, and the transformation of IoT data to productive business results, are core drivers of MindSphere. High value energy focused applications built on EnergyIP powered by MindSphere deliver measurable results through digital services that are based on best practice solutions

Learnings from a Large Scale Flex Pilot

Alexander Savelkoul and Roy Roessink

My presentation will cover the role and relevance of flexibility in the energy transition. I will introduce Enpuls and elaborate on the way we co-operates with partners like start-ups, energy companies and cooperatives, universities, and others, to develop new flexibility concepts and business cases. I will show some examples of projects we are currently undertaking and I will introduce a new Enpuls program aimed at supporting the development of promising flex concepts.

Engaging customers in DR

Arjen Noorbergen

In the end, all efforts towards a flexible grid supporting sustainable energy, will be carried by consumers.

Consumers will need to make investment decisions. They will need to take technical measures in their homes and have their homes turned upside-down. They will need to change their behaviour and use less electricity at night, where they have been told for ages that the off-peak hours are at night. Flexibility will carry a price, and there will be new pricing models and new service offerings for electricity.

They will need to understand why all of this is necessary to support a transition towards sustainable energy. This will pose questions …

Should I buy a heat pump? What about solar panels? PV or solar collectors? Should I replace my central heating boiler with a heat pump today? Or next time I need to buy a new one? 2050 is still far away. Will there be a subsidy for my project? If not now, maybe in future?

Shall I wait until prices come down? Which of the competing technologies or suppliers should I choose, or can I trust? If I now make these investments and I sell my house, will my house be worth more? Then, what about my car?

Consumers are facing lots of uncertainties, and they are going to be overwhelmed. And this is for a product (electricity) that has no interest whatsoever. Getting consumers engaged is going to be no easy task, and as an industry, we will very likely make things complicated rather than easy and comfortable.

Having built Eneco’s Toon, Arjen Noorbergen has learnt first hand how consumers deal with energy matters. He will share his views on how consumers could potentially be taken from total ignorance to engaged DR-users …

The Building Blocks of a Successful Digitization Strategy

Bas Boorsma

Digitization enables us to organize things better, and differently. The first 25 years of internet facilitated the optimization of an old world running on old organizational principles. Today, we fing ourselves well under way in a new chapter in which we are able to organize things better, and differently, embracing modes of organization that emerged on the back of digitization and that simply did not exist yesterday.

Where exactly do we stand in that journey? What type of architectures, business models and ecosystems apply? How do we marry fresh innovations in our strategies and flag hype when necessary? How does all of this apply to the world of energy?

Privacy and Security in Design

Hans Baars and Edward Benning

This presentation covers the following subjects:

Introduction of the new EU laws – an overview as people are unaware of what this means and the impact it will have.
Use cases of general hacks – what are the places where systems were hacked or cracked and how this will impact on the future of the electricity grid for example.
Smart meter roll-out in the UK – how people are mitigating security into the grand design of the roll out.
How we, as smart energy innovators, are teaming up to build new services and new solutions to take care of the sustainability revolution, and if we want security by design from day one – how do we do that.

E.on experience with Virtual Power Plant & Flexibility

Martin Daronnat

This talk is about the E.ON experience with Virtual Power Plant (VPP) & Flexibility. It has the following outline:

Introduction to E.ON
What is a VPP
Challenges on how to build and operate a VPP
Wrap up and vision

Storage market development

Bart Hoevenaars

In this talk I will tell you about

Developments in storage
Tesla’s role in these market developments
Hi level overview of how Tesla Powerpack & Powerwall technologies work, functionally. Not technically
How can companies team up with Tesla Powerpack & Powerwall

Motivating home-owners to invest in sustainability

Bianca Anastacia

In her talk Bianca will elaborate on the challenging task to make our residential world more sustainable: when asked, 50% of the people will tell that they want a more sustainable home, yet only 1% is actually making efforts.

At FLEXCON, she will tell you what the 3 most important reasons are why consumers do not get into action. She will show how ABN AMRO works together with partners in the energy ecosystem to identify barriers, find ways to overcome these barriers and making investing in homes more attractive.

FURI – How are USEF, EFI and PowerMatcher related

Bob Ran

Energy transition demands a vast amount of flexibility from the demand side of the energy system. The aggregator plays a key role in the unlocking of flexibility. However, the ecosystem in which it operates is very complex, one consisting of multiple network operators, multiple BRPs, multiple competing aggregators and many end-users. So, how do we ensure flawless operation of a dynamic ecosystem that is in transition?

To be able to do this, open, scalable and interoperable technologies play an important role. In the FURI project an aggregator implementation is created based on the open technologies:

USEF (Market model for the trading of flexibility)
EFI (Communication protocol for energy flexibility)
EF-PI (Home Gateway Platform for Smart Houses)
PowerMatcher (Transactive Energy based Demand Response Technology)

This presentation reveals how these technologies relate to each other and how synergy is created in combining them in a clean and open-source implementation of this technology chain.

Distributed Intelligence in Energy

Casey Bleeker

In the flexible energy industry, data must be processed in real-time and shared with relevant 3rd party providers. Edge compute allows a developer to perform these actions securely within the customer premise in a containerized application running in the network. This allows developers to still receive the benefits of cloud management, solving numerous scale, security, and data sovereignty issues unique to utility and energy management.

In this interactive workshop you will see how Cisco delivers APIs to developers that enable organizations to construct their own enterprise grade IoT environment for themselves and for their customers. You will learn why Edge Computing is valuable to the flexible energy industry, and see a live deployment of an IoT-based energy grid with the tools from Cisco that are available for developers and Enterprises.

Flex trading in Germany

Christian Irion

My talk will be about

Energy industry today and future outlook
Energy customers today and upcoming power products
Grid situation today and scenarios
Shall EV manufacturers become energy suppliers?

USEF project: Energie Koplopers 2

Claire Groosman

Liander believes the grid company of the future should have the possibility to influence supply and demand, as an alternative option for strengthening the grid.

One way of establishing that is through a market for flexibility. Alliander uses the (open-source) USEF framework and its market coordination mechanism for setting up that market and we collaborate with several market parties on different locations gaining hands on experience. One of those locations is EnergieKoplopers 2 in Heerhugowaard (NL)

Distributed Energy Flexibility Platform & Interface (dEFPi)

Coen van Leeuwen

The Distributed Energy Flexibility Platform & Interface (dEF-Pi) aims to create an interoperable platform that is able to connect to a variety of appliances and support a host of Demand Side Management (DSM) approaches. This way the energy management system (EMS) hardware does not need to be changed when a consumers switches from one service to another. At the same time the Energy Flexibility Platform & Interface makes it easier for service providers to introduce new services, since they do not have to provide the EMS hardware to their consumers to go with it.

The goal of dEF-Pi is to provide a runtime environment that makes it possible to quickly design and implement services. An important factor is the ability to support more than one node that is hosting instances of services. dEF-Pi abstracts the difficulties that arise when deploying services on separated nodes. It is designed with scalability in mind, meaning that the platform itself is lightweight enough to handle large amounts of nodes and subsequently a large amount of service instances. Because the changes of failures increase exponentially when the amount of nodes or services increase, the robustness of the platform is very important.

In the dEF-Pi coding session, you will learn to build a dEF-Pi service that can be deployed, and integrated into a larger service-oriented application. In order to participate you will need at least a working development environment with maven and a java compiler; docker is required if you want to be able to deploy the service, and eclipse is the recommended IDE.

The role of system operators in a distributed energy landscape

Daan Six

In my FLEXCON talk I will address the following subjects:

The Energy landscape is in transition: from fossil to renewables, from centralized to decentralized.
The tension between energy efficiency and flexibility. In the past the focus was merely on efficiency, now more and more need for flexibility but efficiency and flexibility are not independent from each other.
The impact on system needs and services, as well as interactions between market players. Markets and regulation are changing: this impacts system operators responsibilities, how they interact with each other and with other stakeholders like aggregators, decentralized prosumers etc. How markets can/have to be organized? Energy as a service.
Focus on possibilities of coordination between TSOs and DSOs

OGEMA Gateway for Open Social Energy Management and Building Automation

David Nestle

Outline

Introduction into the OGEMA Framework with SDK and Appstore
Social Energy Management and Community and Gamification-based Incentive for Energy Management and provision of demand flexibility
Building Control System based on OGEMA for commercial / office buildings
Life-Demo of the sema system and of the extensibility via SDK/Appstore

A flexible and efficient energy ecosystem requires an integration of various loads and generation devices in buildings as well as user interaction. OGEMA is designed as operating system for energy efficient building control providing a comprehensive API that allows extending the system to specific building and user requirements. Extensions are developed as modules based on Java and the OGEMA Software Development Kit (SDK). Users can install, manage and share such modules (so called OGEMA apps) via the OGEMA Appstore.

Social Energy Management (sema) stands for a concept that gives users an incentive to use electricity in times with high renewable generation from PV and wind. These incentives are not monetary, but the users collect sema points and interact via a competition, but also support each other via community functionalities.

The demonstration will include a live demo of the SDK and Appstore with a system running in a sema field test with private households that was started beginning 2017, which uses OGEMA as a technology base. In this field test users can now develop own apps and share them via the OGEMA Appstore. Also further activities regarding productive use in commercial settings such as an office building will be discussed.

Implementing EEBus in the Rennovates project

Dennis van Goch and Niklas Arpula

The EEBus Initiative develops internationally harmonized communication standards for intelligent networking of household appliances and energy efficiency applications. In this workshop, we explore what EEBus can mean for future smart neighbourhoods like developed within the RENnovates project.

REnnovates (H2020 project) is a concept for deep renovation of houses towards net-zero-energy and integration of houses into smart neighbourhoods using smart control. Within NL, over 240 houses are realized in demonstrators using EEBus to realize communication among smart devices. Within the workshop, we present the concepts, explore the value and challenge the audience to think along.

Blockchain enabled smart charging

Hector Garcia

I will cover the following subjects in my talk

Current overview of MotionWerk with respect to Share&Charge and Oslo2Rome
Grid operation – connecting charing poles
Smart charging – Blockchain enabled
Pilot set-up for smart charging

Need for industrial Flex standard

François-Régis Déhéry

The aim of my talk is to give an insight into the aggregator role both as a commercial and technical partner for industrial customers to meet energy cost reductions in cross-commodity systems, gas and power. Starting from customer needs and regulatory boundaries, I will deepen the subject to other topics some industrial customers are, for now, not aware of, to free the asset flexibility like circular information flows, nowcasting of energy demand in a factory, live-pricing of flexibility options and automatic trading.

This paradigm shift in the world of energy delivery requires bidirectional interfaces, compression of relevant information and short-term recalculation of operation schedules to meet the whole market potential in a technically safe way without interfering with the industrial core business.

The European Clean Energy Package: New Rules – New Games?

Frauke Thies

European legislative proposals on Energy Market Design and what they mean for flexibility in the European power system

Market access
Aggregator framework
Dynamic pricing and consumer empowerment
Flexibility markets and the use of flexibility in distribution networks
Smart buildings and homes

Flow battery for neigborhoods

Guido Dalessi

The exponential growth of renewable energy generation has created an urgent need for low-cost, scalable storage solutions. Generating sufficient renewable electricity is no longer the problem. Instead, balancing supply and demand has become the real challenge, to an extend that availability of an economical storage solution has become decisive for the energy transition.

Elestor’s storage solution is based on Hydrogen Bromine Flow Battery technology. The company’s mission to reduce the cost of electricity to an absolute minimum is realized by combining 1) the unique features of the Flow Battery principle with 2) the choice for abundant (thus low cost) active materials and 3) Elestor’s patented, low-cost, system design.

This triple cost reduction strategy had resulted in storage costs, factors lower than of traditional batteries, at a level of as low as € 0.05 per kWh (‘Levelized Cost of Storage’). This changes storage from a pure cost factor into economic viable business cases, and is the key to boost the energy transition.

Your Energy Moment: Heatpump, Powerwall Battery, API

Hubert Spruijt and Roy Roessink

Enpuls and Senfall show the results of a succesfull partnership. Enpuls mentiones the challenges from the perspective of a DSO and the future role for partners like Senfall in facing these challenges. This is illustrated in a live demo of “Your Energy Moment” (Jouw Energie Moment) .

Senfall will give a unique insight in their R1 battery pool, and give a demonstration of the way batteries are managed, using steering signals from the RGO, day ahead market and primary reserve market.

Additionally, an outlook of viable smart energy ecosystems and the position of Enpuls and Senfal will introduce the flexibility success factors.

Towards a renewable, independent, flexible neighbourhood in Amsterdam.

A practical use case focussed on technical progress and challenges

Hugo Niesing

Outline of my presentation:

Forecasting of neighbourhood energy flow
Real-time monitoring neighbourhood energy flow
Development of an automatized methodology to have available batteries interact with the grid in a customized way

Bidirectional Energy Flows

Jacqueline Piero

I will tell you about:

The place of Nuvve’s technology in the evolving energy ecosystem, and how increasing needs for flexibility can be met by aggregation of highly distributed kW-scale resources placed behind the meter at the edges of the distribution network. This includes the potential for provision of services at the DSO-level as well as at the transmission-distribution interface.
How to change EVs from a perceived complicating factor in power system planning to a flexibility resource
The relationship between technology-neutral market frameworks and flexibility
How recognition of the economic value of energy as a service can unlock flexibility and encourage a shift from baseload-focused policies and markets

Sonnen Community Vision

Jean-Baptiste Cornefert

My talk is about the sonnen community: how to create an energy community based on a network of decentral batteries. It will cover the following items:

Intro Sonnen
Presentation of the community concept
Vision & evolution
Wrap up

Trading of flex in EV’s

Jorg van Heesbeen

This presentation is about:

The Jedlix smart charging platform and product overview
User Experience with smart charging
Market potential of smart charging
Connected car and chargepoint developments

Virtual power plants with VHPready

protocols, security and data aspects

Klaus-Dieter Walter

Short introduction to VHPready e. V. and virtual power plants (VPP): Who is the VHPready e. V. and what are we doing? VPP: only a simple cluster of electricity generators, loads and storage systems?

VHPready technology building blocks: VHPready control center and VHPready gateway. IT security, remote access and control protocols for the WAN connection between control center and gateway. Data points for different decentralized energy systems.

Physical and logical connection to decentralized energy systems: Details of the physical interfaces and the “VHPready 4.0-specific media break”. What protocols are used within different systems and how to interface to these protocols?

VHPready use case: What data points are necessary to integrate a CHP (combined heat and power) system? How to interface the VHPready 4.0 gateway to the CHP system controller? What are the challenges with micro CHPs?

Smart Home API

Kristiyan-Boyanov

During this technical workshop Kristiyan will talk about the MClimate’s API, what are the opportunities to work with it and the needed steps for integration with MClimate. A short demo for the integration development will be demonstrated.

Keynote day 2

Laurent Schmitt

Under construction

Smart homes, Smart buildings and flexible energy

Lyubomir Yanchev

In my presentation I will share my vision on how energy companies can apply demand response programmes for residential customers based on electric boilers.

An introduction into Smart Charging

Marieke van Amstel

In the Paris agreement countries have granted to keep the global warming beneath 2 ℃ which is expected to be caused by the emission of greenhouse gases. Sectors with the highest emissions are: Power-, residential and tertiary-, industry-, transport- and the agriculture sector. These sectors are therefore looking for ways to reduce the emissions. Major pollutants are fossil resources (oil, gas and coal). Electricity (power sector), movement (transportation) and heating (households & industry) are main users of these resources. Changes that are needed in these sectors will have a direct influence on the Dutch energy system. Innovations such as decentral (renewable) power generation, electrification of heating and transport, increases the pressure on the energy system.

It will result in more volatility in energy supply and higher capacity need in the electricity network. This leads to an increasing need for flexibility by the transmission system operator, distribution system operator and balance responsible party. To use the capacity of the grid as efficient as possible and to facilitate the integration of sustainable energy generation, flexibility on the demand side of energy usage seems to be the most cost efficient, technology mature and implementable solution. To make this possible a new market organisation needs the be established. I am researching what the best organisation of markets is with the most social value in the Dutch context.

USEF – a generic framework for energy flexibility trading

Dr. Ir. Marten van der Laan

Topics that will be covered are:

Value of flexibility
Different stakeholders
Flexibility trading
Alignment with energy markets
Unlocking flexibility assets

USEF has been established to drive the fastest, most cost-effective route to an integrated smart energy future. It delivers one common standard on which to build all smart energy products and services. It unlocks the value of flexible energy use by making it a tradeable commodity and by delivering the market structure and associated rules and tools required to make it work effectively. USEF fits on top of most energy market models, extending existing processes to offer the integration of both new and existing energy markets. It is designed to offer fair market access and benefits to all stakeholders and is accessible to anyone internationally.

USEF sees the Aggregator as a key role. Aggregators exploit flex and maximize the value of flex for its customers. They bundle small flex assets into a flexibility volume. Aggregator is a new market role that can be taken by existing market parties (suppliers) and new entrants. Aggregators’ role requires additional regulation.

Green Mountain Power: An Energy Transformation Company

Video conference with Mary Powell

My presentation will cover

Moving to a home, business & community energy based system
Leveraging innovation like battery storage to drive down costs of the antiquated grid
Being customer obsessed in everything we do to deliver a cleaner, more cost effective & reliable energy future

Energy Flexibility Interface

Mente Konsman

This session will explain the Energy Flexibility Interface (EFI) and how it promotes the much needed interoperability between devices and energy management applications. First the rationale behind EFI will be addressed; there are so many standards already, why do we need another one? We will then have a look at the main architectural concepts of EFI.

The session will conclude with an overview of the actual interface itself showing you how we model energy flexibility in a generic way.

The Jouliette – a blockchain-based renewable energy token

Philip Gladek

The presentation is primarily about the Jouliette project and the broader potential for this renewable energy token.

The Jouliette – named after the Joule unit of energy – is a blockchain-based energy token which empowers individuals and communities to easily manage and share their locally produced renewable energy. On 15 September 2017, the Jouliette token was launched at De Ceuvel, a community in Amsterdam which has become a globally visible showcase for sustainable urban development.

The project aims to harness the capabilities of blockchain technology to create greater social value and to support a bottom-up transition towards a more decentralized, transparent, and circular economy, underpinned by 100 percent renewable energy.

The Jouliette project was realized through a collaboration between Dutch DSO, Alliander, smart energy system integrator, Spectral, and the De Ceuvel community.The presentation will cover both the technical and social aspects of the project thus far, as well as provide an outlook for future / ongoing spin-off developments associated with the Jouliette.

Keyword for my talk are:

Blockchain technology
Local energy markets / P2P trading
Smart microgrids
Local, resource-based micro-economies

Demand side flexibility in the UK

market outlook and lessons learnt

Philippa Hardy

From the UK perspective, I will give a market outlook and lessons learnt at Delta Energy & Environment.

I will address the following items

The UK market: current status – sources of flexibility, stakeholders, customers, technology, business models
How do we see this market evolving and why?
What can we learn from the UK?

Global demand side flexibility market

Philippa Hardy

I will perform a business model evolution, and analyse what works and why

I will address the following items

How are current stakeholders building businesses around demand side flexibility and time-of-use optimization?
How is this evolving and what are the likely changes in the future?
What are the key success factors?

Heatpumps and Flex in Europe

Peter Wagener

Domestic heat pumps will be the largest electricity appliance in the house. These heat pumps can shift electrical power to heat and with thermal storage postpone demand. Therefore, heat pumps can potentially deliver flexibility on the grid and enlarge intermittent renewable energy integration.

But to unlock this flexibility these heat pumps must be made smart to have some sort of communication with the grid (or with other consumers of producers of energy). This presentation is about this broad topic and will show that this are not just technical barriers that have to be overcome.

Connecting 100.000 consumers in France

Pierre Bivas

Households, small businesses and public buildings all participate in making demand flexible in order to increase the reliability of the power system, and reduce the cost of electricity for all as well as CO2 emissions.

Because this flexibility is so valuable for all consumers, a small share of this value can be used to pay for DR and automation, so that participation to DR remains free for all consumers offering their flexibility. Market design must simply ensure that DR can fully participate in the electricity wholesale markets as an alternative to generation – cheaper, greener and more flexible.

The need for a short term intraday market

Pol van der Linde

My talk is about Intraday Energy Trading. I will take you on a tour through the market development and will address the need for intraday trading. I am also zooming in on trading platforms and DSO energy management systems.

Backoffice Algorithm and Appliances working with EFI

Ralf Bosch & Wilfred Hoogerbrugge

Based on real world experience with EFI Wilfred will cover the following items:

Why using EFI
Modeling (matching devices onto the EFI abstractions)
Implementation experiences and details

Ralf will cover the subject of algorithms and Smart Grid Smart Home

Car & beyond

Robbert Monteban

I will tell you all about

Bi-directional charging
How EV is a major item the energy Transition
Nissan vision 2022
The growth of EV in total amount of traffic
The Evolution of batteries

OpenADR: The standard, the implementation and future direction

of the Demand Response and Distributed Energy Resources communication protocol

Rolf Bienert

This session will provide the audience with an in-depth look at the OpenADR protocol for Demand Response and Distributed Energy Resources management. The speakers will review the history of OpenADR, how it is currently used, and what the future plans for the technology include.

After this introduction, AutoGrid, an OpenADR Alliance board of directors member, will show how OpenADR is implemented into their demand side management platform and how it interacts with flexibility resources at the customer site.

Using OpenADR for Flexibility Management in Production Applications

Thorsten Stechert

Under construction

Flex Opportunities with rapid Electric vehicle uptake

Tim van Beek

Outline of the presentation:

Drivers for Global, European and Dutch EV uptake
EV models and developments
Projections for the EV market until 2030.
Charging behaviour
Impact on electricity volumes and grid impact
Different options for smart charging
Opportunities for FCR, trading and V2G

Transactive Energy introduction & simulation

Trevor Hardy

The Transactive Energy Simulation Platform (TESP) is a freely available pre-assembled co-simulation test environment for transactive system development. Developed for the US Department of Energy by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) as part of their Transactive Systems Program, TESP provides modular implementations of common transactive system components (transmission system, distribution system, transactive agents) and corresponding simulators that dynamically exchange data to reveal the effects of the implemented transactive system.

This presentation will review the development and capabilities of TESP and provide a demonstration of its capabilities.

Post-Blockchain Era

Wilfried Pimenta de Miranda

The IOTA Foundation is the not-for-profit organisation behind the Tangle, the next generation opensource Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) beyond Blockchain, fit for the Internet of Things and more.

This session will address the new landscape of opportunities enabled by the Tangle in the smart energy and connected mobility sectors in particular. The IOTA Foundation will present its vision of the machine-to-machine economy and explain its approach to foster true co-creation and collaboration across silos of industries to bring the DLT potential to real life scalable application.

The role of energy flexible buildings within the energy transition: IEA Annex 67 Energy Flexible Buildings

Wim Zeiler

This talk is about the research undertaken by the IEA Annex 67 workshop, which defines the energy flexibility of buildings, tries to quantify and qualify the flexible so that it can be used in different control strategies.

Topics to be covered are:

introduction of IEA Annex 67 Energy Flexible Buildings
definition of energy flexible buildings
the added value of energy flexible buildings towards user as well as Smart Grid
some examples of different approaches: simulation models versus learning mechanism
some experimental results
further work of the IEA Annex workgroup

Energy Startup Challenge

The following startups will participate:

Dajie, distritbuted autonomous joint internet & energy for everyone

twingz, smart energy management

Dexter Energy, energy saving and sustainability for the making industry

Ecovat, smart storage, smart business

Energy Bazaar, Developing decentralised energy exchanges with grid optimisation and control for emerging countries