ICT platform for sustainable infrastructures
Researchers: Anders Rantzer, Bo Bernhardsson, Carolina Lidström, Magnus Perninge, Richard Pates, partners at IEA and KTH.
Funding: Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research
Resource-efficient infrastructures are critical for sustainable societies that want to maintain and improve today’s standard of living. National and international climate goals imply large increases in renewable electricity production. This variable generation together with the increasing international trading of electricity affects the power flows in the electricity networks, which needs to be managed by system operators on local, regional and national levels. This development is in addition to the continuously increasing demand on reliable electricity supply. Traditionally this double challenge would be met by the building of new power lines. This is a simple and effective solution, but due to public reluctance to new power lines and the lengthy permission process alternatives are sought for. One general alternative is to use automation for optimizing the use of the available network capacity. This concept - currently referred to as Smart Grids - involves investment in and installation of ICT equipment rather than physical capacity. While having been applied locally before, the situation now calls for application on a system-wide scale. Similar trends can be observed in other infrastructures.
This project aims to to design the decision-layer of an ICT platform for controlling large-scale infrastructures to operate reliably, economically, and with minimum resource waste. Special attention is given to functionality for detecting, clearing and recovering from critical operating conditions. A key component is the ARISTO real-time power system simulator, which will be used as demonstrator to illustrate the results.
2017-02-01