Fraunhofer-IEE

02.03.2018

The Fraunhofer Institute for “Institute for Energy Economics and Energy System Technology (IEE) has its core competence in energy management and system design. It is concentrated on system modelling and the associated analyses of political and economic options for action. The considered systems cover technical (producers, consumers, storage, grid, etc.) as well as economic components (energy market, business models, etc.). Research topics include among others the integrated simulation of future energy supply structures, system analyses and technology assessment, integration of markets and systems, interaction of the sectors electricity-heat- transport, international, national and regional energy concepts and their evaluation as well as energy solutions for the industry. Fraunhofer IEE consists of about 310 employees and has an annual budget of about 20Mio €. The departments, which are most active in this projects, are “Department of Grid Planning and Grid Operation” and “Energy Informatics” focuse on research and development of new approaches for system operation strategies and solutions as well as of statistical and physical based models for the prediction of energy generation and consumption.

Main Task within the EU-SysFlex project

We are aiming to develop a new approach of coordinating and managing active power requests from
the overlaying network (e.g. TSO – DSO) for conventional and renewable energy sources in the
distribution network. Including price sensitivities and current network states, this approach will
provide a realistic active power potential in order to save costs originating from congestion
measures. In order to realize this approach, we utilize advanced forecast techniques, already
developed system architectures for the installation in operation systems as well as extensive
simulations and optimization approaches.

In the two mentioned departments we have a vast experience from completed and ongoing projects. In the department “Grid Planning and Grid Operation” we use an own developed real-time co-simulation environment with various standardized interfaces in order to set up a test environment and run relevant scenarios in order to validate the newly developed methods and analyze its impact on the current energy system as well as scaled and future systems. The methods  and functionalities will then be implemented in our system environment for the integration within in control center of the DSO. We also maintain an own developed powerflow and network analysis framework which will be used for the development of the optimization algorithm.

The department “Energy Informatics” is doing research on forecast systems for more than ten years.
The focus lies on production forecasts of wind power, photovoltaics (PV) and biomass as well as on
load forecast on different grid levels. The forecast algorithms are mainly based on hybrid models of
statistical and physical model approaches with high focus on machine learning techniques. The
department operates different forecast systems which are used in the daily business by three
German TSOs. Moreover the department owns a forecast demonstration system to test new forecast
systems under real conditions. The available infrastructure will be used within this project to set-up
and to run forecast models for all relevant wind farms, PV systems and aggregations of load that are
required for subsequent grid calculations. The forecasts models will be extended with additional
models estimating the forecast uncertainty.

Person in charge of the project: Sebastian Wende von Berg

More info: https://www.iee.fraunhofer.de/en.html

Contact: sebastian.wende-von.berg@iee.fraunhofer.de