Work Package 4 describes RENergetic activities in the Ghent Pilot site.
Based on the existing sustainable energy and data infrastructure in the first phases of the “Nieuwe Dokken” development, CEIP and its subsidiary DuCoop are trying to optimize the consumption of local renewable energy sources (RES) and waste heat (district heating network); based on monitoring and managing data from collective and private energy loads in the neighborhood. By using intelligent algorithms for the energy management system (EMS), CEIP will try to limit congestion of the local DSO-grid (PV injection/peak load) and create new opportunities for grid services (flexibility to TSO, matching intermittent RES with local demand, ec.). CEIP will contribute to the integration of Renewable/Citizen energy communities in Flanders by exploring the opportunities of collective energy systems for local renewable energy production, storage and optimal distribution (e.g., EV charging infrastructure, district heat pump, etc. to increase consumption of locally produced renewable energy). In the work on the alignment of KPIs with other RENergetic partners and relevant European projects CEIP and its subsidiary DuCoop have been working on a thorough integration of different technologies and data management systems in the Nieuwe Dokken district in Ghent.
During the last 12 months, CEIP has successfully implemented and tested the metric-API that is being used to allow interaction between the DuCoop EMS platform and the RENergetic tools that are being developed and tested by the other RENergetic partners. First successful trials with the RENergetic Global optimizer (see T 3.2) were executed.
Meanwhile, CEIP and its subsidiary DuCoop progressively advanced the integration of different technologies and data management systems in the Nieuwe District in Ghent. After starting a successful control strategy for the local district battery system (fully operational since Q2 2021) other rule engines and optimization strategies were implemented: e.g., on the optimal integration of waste heat sources in the local district heating network, for example by controlling the activation of the aquathermal heat pump that recovers waste heat from the effluent of the wastewater treatment plant that is being managed by DuCoop.
Also, in other fields (Heat demand response, heat demand forecasting, peak shifting/reduction, electricity capacity tariff mechanism) new tools have been successfully tested and introduced.
New hardware has been installed that should enable more possibilities for smarter management of the local EV charging infrastructure. In the coming period, new tools will be developed to implement individual charging profiles, based on the preferences of the customers and the optimal sustainability/cost structure for the district energy system.
During the coming months, CEIP/DuCoop are working further on a district manager dashboard, that will allow to automatically generate and interactively broadcast operational and economical KPI’s in an online dashboard. Although the establishment of a Grafana dashboard in the earlier reporting period (M0-M18) already allowed to monitor a lot of technical and economic data series, the limitations of the Grafana platform became all too obvious. For that reason, a separate monitoring dashboard will be developed for the Ghent pilot in reactJS.
So far, the WP4 significant results can be summarized as follows:
