Market-Based Control and Agent-Based Trading in Combined Heat and Power Grids

This talk is focused on a micro energy grid concept that should enable (i) the efficient integration of decentralized energy resources (heat and power), (ii) the provisioning of production and consumption incentives, which should lead to an overall peak-load reduction, and (iii) the integration with the existing technical grid infrastructure. In particular a mechanism for the market based coordination of combined heat and power micro grids is presented. This approach requires energy consumers (producers) to buy (sell) their energy demands (supplies) through a specialized electronic auction platform. First results on the efficiency of this approach are presented. As manually negotiating energy demand and supply on such a market is a tedious task, its automation is highly desirable. Thus strategies for demand and supply side electronic trading agents are currently under development. In this talk first results from research in this area are presented. Last not least it is important that these micro grids can be seamlessly integrated into the already existing energy infrastructure. The talk thus finishes with an outlook on an applied project that aims at equipping approx. 800 energy consumers (mainly households and SMEs) and about 200 energy generators (centralized and decentralized) with such a market-based energy energy management infrastructure as part of a large field test.