AAAS 2014, Annual Meeting

The Symposium:

 

Making Power, Taking Power: Renewable Microgrids in National Electricity Strategies

Abstact: While utilities continue to pursue and develop centralized renewable energy to replace and supplement existing fossil
fueled power plants, an electricity generation strategy based on wind and solar community-scale microgrids promises
greater flexibility and resiliency, at potentially lower cost. Can one implement such strategies in local communities? What
are the social and environmental impediments? This symposium features a discussion with Danish and U.S. colleagues
on the technical, economic, and social feasibility of renewable energy microgrids, and investigates issues that may arise
from interconnections with utility macrogrids. The discussion is framed in the context of the Danish government’s
implementation of a program to enable the energy demand of Denmark be based entirely on renewable resources by
2050. The symposium looks at the issues involved in public acceptance of such strategies, and how one needs to inform
the public of options based on scientific fact and not on opinion. Speakers will discuss the design, implementation,
behavioral, and public policy aspects of microgrid installation and operation, and the feasibility of a microgrid generation
strategy for addressing national energy needs. The panel will then discuss the roadblocks ahead at incorporating
renewable energy resources into a national electrical grid.

 

Organizer: Michael Isaacson, University of California, Santa Cruz
Discussant: Esben Larsen, Technical University of Denmark

Speakers:
Brian Vad Mathiesen, Aalborg University
The Danish Strategy for 100% Renewable Energy Generation

Bo Nørregaard Jorgensen, University of Southern Denmark
The Role of Industrial Processes in Balancing the Fluctuating Production from Renewable Energy Sources

Ali Shakouri, Purdue University
Novel Renewable Energy Heat and Electric Generation Sources

Peter Karnoe, Aalborg University
Disruptive Aspects of High Penetration of Wind Power

Melanie DuPuis, University of California, Santa Cruz
Sociological Aspect of Implementation of Renewable Energy

Ronnie Lipschutz, University of California, Santa Cruz
Political Considerations of a Renewable Energy Strategy

 

The role of industrial processes in balancing the fluctuating production from renewable energy sources
by Professor MSO, Head of Centre for Smart Energy Solutions Bo Nørregaard Jørgensen

 

Abstract
The presentation will discuss the process industry’s future role as Prosumers in the Smart Grid. Process industries can become Prosumers in the Smart Grid by combining their co-generation facilities with the intrinsic energy flexibility of their processes. Thereby providing the means to balance the fluctuating production from renewable energy sources like wind and solar. However, this is a non-trivial challenge, as it requires intelligent integration of the production processes with the Smart Grid.

Summary
Over the past decades, Denmark has been transformed from being a country with a few central power plants to a country dominated by many decentralized power plants, in the form of Combined Heat and Power (CHP) plants and windmills. This change of the energy landscape fits well with the idea of community-scale micro grids, where the production of energy by Distributed Energy Resources (DER) happens in close proximity of its consumers.

In Denmark, many CHP plants are owned by medium-sized process industries, which need the produced heat and power to drive their industrial processes. The production from these CHP plants not only supports their own needs for process heat, it is also common that process industries collaborate with district heating companies to deliver district heating to local communities. Doing so improves the operational costs of running their CHP plants. Furthermore, with the increased integration of wind power, many of these industries have made a business of selling electricity to the Scandinavian electricity market, Nord Pool Spot. The process industries typically optimize their production of heat and electricity with respect to own needs and the electricity prices on Nord Pool Spot’s day-ahead market.

Process industries have the potential to provide balancing services to community-scale microgrids. Here micro grids may include both electricity grids and district heating. Provision of balancing services requires that process industries can respond to the needs of community-scale microgrids, by dynamically adjusting their production of heat and electricity. If their production of heat and electricity has reached its maximum capacity, the capacity can be increased, or recaptured, by dynamically adjusting the energy consumption of the running production processes. However, such adjustment requires models, which correlate the energy consumption of the processes with the processes’ performance in order to guarantee that the resulting quality of the products is not jeopardized. These models capture the intrinsic energy flexibility of the processes. Unfortunately such models are typically non-existing and they have therefore to be created before widespread integration of industrial processes as balancing services will become a reality. There are currently ongoing efforts on creating such models for drying processes. However for some closely related industries such process models exist and current research have shown the feasibility of the approach when applied to one such industry.

One such industry is industrial greenhouses. Here advanced models for optimal plant growth can be used to implement demand-respond based control for the use of heating and artificial lighting. Research in the field shows that integration of industrial greenhouses allow for 0.01 % of the annual Danish electricity consumption to be load-shifted. The result of this research has resulted in a software toolbox - DynaLight, which allows industrial growers to optimize the energy consumption of their greenhouse climate for the day-ahead market.

The implementation of advanced models for controlling the intrinsic energy flexibility of industrial processes requires control software beyond the traditional SCADA systems found throughout industry today. This next generation of control software will have to coordinate the many requirements for the production processes with the needs of the surrounding micro grids. Successful integration of such software in the process industries will allow them to balance the fluctuating production from renewable energy sources like wind and solar for community-scale micro grids and thereby facilitate large-scale integration of wind