Finesce

Overview

The FINESCE project will organise and run user trials in 7 European countries, building on investments of billions of Euro, addressing efficient energy usage in residential and industrial buildings, developing a new prosumer energy marketplace, building a cross-border private virtual power plant, and using electric vehicles (EV) as an element of demand response systems. These trials will enable energy providers to move from reactive to pro-active energy network management by providing them with Future Internet ICT, enabling them to better balance volatile solar and wind energy generation with demand for energy. 

The shift to sustainability is visible everywhere. It is now a European priority to combine solutions which utilise energy generation from renewable energy sources and optimise energy usage efficiency into a Smart Energy system based on the introduction of Future Internet (FI) technologies. In its 2020 vision, the European Commission outlined ambitious targets for “raising the share of EU energy consumption produced from renewable resources to 20%”. In Ireland, this is even more ambitious, with a target of “40% electricity consumption from renewable sources by 2020”.  However, this desire to integrate renewable power sources into the grid imposes significant strains on existing electricity infrastructures. Due to the abundance of wind in Ireland, this will be the predominant source of renewable energy to meet this target. Short term fluctuations in wind energy supply are random, frequent and, though weather modelling plays a crucial role in predicting wind patterns and movements, it is still extremely difficult to accurately forecast this supply. 

Implementation

The FINESCE project will organise and run user trials in 7 European countries, building on investments of billions of Euro, addressing efficient energy usage in residential and industrial buildings, developing a new prosumer energy marketplace, building a cross-border private virtual power plant, and using electric vehicles (EV) as an element of demand response systems. These trials will enable energy providers to move from reactive to pro-active energy network management by providing them with Future Internet ICT, enabling them to better balance volatile solar and wind energy generation with demand for energy. 

Another target is for 10% of all Irish vehicles on the road to be electric by 2020, which potentially means that up to 250,000 EVs will be using the grid for charging. TSSG is developing an energy management system based on self-organising technologies that will monitor energy usage in a network, and suggest and implement efficiencies. The solution will utilize interruptible loads e.g. EV charging, to gain greater advantage of demand side management, thus providing grid operators with the real-time ability to stabilize any fluctuations in the grid supply by controlling the demand. Through extensive collaborations with domestic and European partners, TSSG will use FINESCE to further this know-how to develop a FI management platform for smart EV domestic charge points so it can become a critical tool for the future smart grid. 

Concurrently, any efforts to develop FI based solutions for power systems may be frustrated if future smart grid communications systems are not actually internet based.  Many utilities continue to use synchronous digital hierarchy (SDH) based equipment, standards for which were first developed over 25 years ago.  While deployment of hybrid SDH/IP architectures are planned, there is no large scale migration to a pure IP based smart grid communications architecture, due to the technical difficultly of coping with stringent electrical protection requirements, cyber security and the need to preserve legacy investments. FINESCE is proposing an alternative approach, by demonstrating the use of a highly advanced sub-wavelength communications technology called “Optical Packet Switch and Transport” (OPST) and is produced by Intune Networks. OPST is considered to have the prospect of meeting utilities stringent requirements at a fundamental level, rather than by using advanced control plane or management systems. 

All trials conducted in FINESCE will build upon significant investment in communications, electrical computing and human resources already contributed by the involved organisations, including among others: the use of a €100m long distance dark fibre network provided by ESB; a multi-million euro communications test bed installed by Intune Networks and supported by the Irish Government; an ESB owned 4G distribution network trial; an ESB multi-million euro electrical distribution network test bed; ESB electric vehicle charging equipment and state of the art computing facilities in the TSSG.