Project description

Decarbonisation of European energy systems needs to speed up in order to reach the goals set by the European Energy Roadmap and Low Carbon Europe Roadmap by 2050. The transition to RES plays a key role in the plans to reach these goals. In Europe, 21.9 GW of PV-systems were connected to the grid in 2011, compared to 13.4 GW in 2010, which is in line with the average of 40% increase during the past 15 years. This steady increase has been stimulated tremendously by countries like Germany and Italy using powerful incentives to install systems – both in terms of large power plants and distributed but grid-connected roof-top systems for home owners.

Although this trend is very positive, it offers significant challenges for the grid-operators with respect to balancing the production and the demand, as the predictability of solar power generation – in countries with highly fluctuating insolation, - and subsequent solar cell power output – is very limited. To alleviate this situation and improve the CoSSMic project is developing an innovative autonomic ICT based system, coordinating the energy usage and storage and the exchange with the public grid of clusters of collaborating building micro-grids.

The system will be governed by preferences and constraints set by the building inhabitants, using modern interaction devices such as smartphones and touchpads, and are exploiting pricing signals and other demand side guidance provided by the electric power retailers and public grid operators. Storage can be provided by dedicated batteries, and also by battery powered units connected temporarily for charging, e.g. electric cars. Weather forecasts will be leveraged to predict both the output from the local PV panels and the energy consumption of the households, and thus enable near optimal coordination.

CoSSMic is designed as a low threshold technology, facilitating the emergence of energy -sharing neighbourhoods in a bottom-up manner while requiring minimal central support and resources. To this end the architecture follows a principle of distribution and local autonomy and is designed to achieve robustness to component failures, flexible deployment, scalability and self-configuration. Furthermore the software is designed to run on low cost hardware and the necessary communication with the devices and between households will be based on existing communications infrastructure commonly available in buildings nowadays, such as wifi and Internet, complemented with a variety of lower level protocols for the integration of sensors and devices.