A living lab smart grid demonstration
PowerMatching City
Project
PowerMatching City is part of the Integral Project: a consortium of eleven European partners seeking to build and demonstrate an industrial-quality reference solution for the aggregationlevel control and coordination of distributed energy resources, or, in other words, a smart grid. The Integral Project gets its name from the project partners’ ambition of designing an integrated coordination system for three typical network situations:
> Normal operation
> Critical situations
> Recovery from blackouts
For each of these three situations, a demonstration project is being built. The results of the field tests will be used to realize a generic coordination mechanism.
PowerMatching City is one of the three demonstrations, focusing on ‘normal operation’. The demonstration has been realized by KEMA in cooperation with ECN, Essent and Humiq. The coordination mechanism developed by the means of this field test addresses the question of how a market can be structured, so as to promote the interests of all stakeholders:
> Prosumer: maximizing economic benefit
> Network operator: reducing peak loads
> Producer/Supplier: minimizing imbalance costs by using the cluster as a virtual power plant
In Hoogkerk, a suburb of the Dutch city of Groningen, 25 homes have been equipped with a mix of decentralized energy resources (PV-solar, microCHP and hybrid heat pumps), smart appliances, smart meters and electric vehicles. Together they are called the PowerMatching City project. Wind energy is also supplied by the Kreileroord wind farm. Stabilization and optimization of the network are realized by trading energy on a local market, based on a realtime price signal using the PowerMatcher concept.
Project coordinator
> KEMA, the Netherlands
Project partners
> Humiq, the Netherlands
> ECN, the Netherlands
> Essent, the Netherlands
Project details
> EU Sixth Framework Program
> Duration November 2007 – February 2011 (from Feb 2011, continuing into PowerMatching City II)