February 1, 2006
Infotility completes CSIRO Project - 10,000 node electric distribution system simulated - demonstrating the scalability of the GridAgents platform.... CSIRO remains development partner....
Energy management with smart agent networks
Intelligent management of distributed energy resources is widely seen as an answer to the problems created by peak demand and price volatility. Most small-business and domestic loads are capable of optimal and price-responsive operation. Distributed generation less than 5 MW, placed close to loads, provides greater management flexibility and increased capacity without new power-station and network investment; it is also amenable to waste heat recovery which can double fuel efficiency compared with coal-fired generation.
Yet smaller consumers of electricity have lacked cheap, capable, user-friendly technology to manage their loads and generators intelligently in response to price signals and network constraints. Large consumers employ SCADA systems but generally these systems are not cost-effective to deploy into small-to-medium enterprises, commercial offices, hospitals, campuses, shopping centres, or ultimately individual households.
CSIRO is working on a solution that has opportunities for energy networks, energy retailers, and consumers with energy assets below 11 kV, where traditional centralised network control becomes uneconomic. There are two key tasks. One is providing a low-cost processing and connectivity platform for small users, which has been achieved by using hardware that is either off the shelf, such as a personal digital assistant (PDA), or close to it. The other task is developing the distributed intelligence required to aggregate and control on-site energy assets in a way that suits energy retailers and network businesses but also allows consumers to control and choose how their supply is handled.
The platform and its capabilities are based on intelligent “agent” technology. Distributed energy agents that sense, compute, switch, and communicate with each other could provide advantages for individual businesses and the entire network. System-wide benefits include the ability to aggregate supply and demand from groups of customers to flatten out peak demand and the formation of intelligent islands or mini-grids that can survive supply disconnections and that continue to provide services in the face of contingencies on the main grid. Energy retailers could use aggregated supply and demand to manage their exposure to wholesale electricity prices, network businesses could defer capital expenditure, and SCADA companies could use agents as an affordable “last-mile” solution for smaller customers.
A key component of agent technology is the installation of software to create an intelligent device situated at the customers’ premises. Designed to interact with other agents across the entire distribution network, this device can automatically switch loads and generators according to an energy savings policy decided by, and optimised for, each customer. Working with US-based software developer Infotility, CSIRO has completed the first release of the GridAgents software framework and is building a demonstration system at the CSIRO Energy Centre in Newcastle, Australia, putting a gas micro-turbine, photovoltaic arrays, and a wind generator under agent control, along with two cool rooms and a zone of a building climate system. This will form a mini-grid coordinating supply and demand and reacting intelligently to electricity market or retail contract price signals. Later testing has included up to 10,000 GridAgents technology nodes.
The Australian electricity industry is struggling with ever-increasing summer demand peaks and fixed tariff structures are providing no incentive for demand-side initiatives. Forward-thinking utilities are trialling interval meters with market-linked tariffs and critical price signals. Initial results show that consumers are hungry for direct information and willing to change usage patterns for financial and community benefits. Agent technology represents the next crucial step, enabling optimised energy management tailored to each customer’s preferences, switching without direct hour-by-hour intervention by the user, and providing automatic aggregation across the network to give significant demand response capacity. The first wide-scale deployment of CSIRO’s agent technology could be as early as 2007 and will be in partnership with Australia’s leading-edge utilities.
About GridAgents. GridAgents, an Infotility, Inc. company is the leading provider of real-time Collaborative Stream Processing (CSP) software that monitors and processes streaming data from any source or device, aggregating and coordinating information from multiple sources, assuring accessibility, usefulness, security, and survivability across any network. GridAgents’ software is applicable to any community of smart devices or sensors on the Pervasive Internet in the Sensor-Tagged world, where latency, immediacy, complex analytic/business rules, end-point processing, and security are critical issues, and the overheads of complex database management systems are of concern. GridAgents, with headquarters in Boulder, Colorado, is the major business unit of Infotility, Inc., a software and services company which was formed in 2000.
About CSIRO: The Energy Transformed Flagship is a CSIRO initiative and part of the National Research Flagships program that aims to deliver scientific solutions to advance Australia's most important national objectives. One of the largest scientific initiatives ever mounted in Australia, it aligns closely with the Federal Government's National Research Priorities. The initiative brings together our national research resources to deliver breakthroughs in fields ranging from healthcare to light metals and the environment. For further information please contact:
Geoff James: Research Scientist, ICT Centre Marsfield, Australia +61 2 9325 3276
Terry E. Jones: DET Division Newcastle.
David Cohen: CEO, GridAgents, an Infotility, Inc Company, USA