DEER

Decentralised Redispatch (DEER): interfaces for providing flexibility services

DEER is developing and testing an edge-based concept for the use of distributed flexibility services in the electricity system. In this concept, small consumption and generation facilities, along with battery storage systems, as typically used by private households or small and medium-sized companies, are incorporated into measures to maintain grid stability. Micro power plants are enabled to participate in the “redispatch” procedure, which is used to avoid expected daily bottlenecks in the electricity grid. For this purpose, power consumption, power generation and power storage are flexibly coordinated, depending on the grid load. As the number of micro power plants continues to grow as part of the transition towards renewable energy, DEER is helping to transform the energy system, which will in future increasingly consist of a large number of small, decentralised plants, by developing interfaces for the provision of flexibility services by decentralised micro plants.

Market perspectives and product claims
In Germany, power plant operators are obliged to define a schedule one day in advance, detailing which power plants will be in operation, their capacities and corresponding periods of use. This schedule, referred to as a dispatch, is then sent to the relevant transmission system operator (TSO) overseeing the balancing zone where the power plants are located. Using the submitted schedules, TSOs calculate the grid load for the following day across the entirety of Germany. This process enables them to identify potential bottlenecks in specific parts of the electricity grid. To prevent these bottlenecks, power plant operators are recommended to adjust their electricity production in order to stabilise the grid. This balancing process is known as redispatching. Since 2021, all plants with a capacity of 100 kW or more have been included in Redispatch 2.0.

Decentralised, smaller plants with a capacity of below 100 kW are not covered by Redispatch 2.0. Units from behind the electricity meter also typically require disproportionate effort to be made usable. As the number of these micro power plants is expected to rise while the number of larger power plants declines, the redispatch instrument will only remain effective if micro plants with capacities of below 100 kW also contribute to flexibility as the energy transition progresses. The use of conventional fossil energy generators in the redispatch process must also be reduced to save CO2 emissions.

The overarching goal of the DEER project is to bundle and control the flexibility potential of small-scale plants using decentralised edge technology, thus integrating the decentralised plants into the higher-level redispatch process. In this way, the redispatch regime will evolve to become Redispatch 3.0. The project focuses on analysing the potential of various technologies that need to be coordinated in order to implement the concept: edge computing, multi-agent systems (MAS), blockchain processes, self-sovereign identities (SSI) and zero-knowledge proofs (ZKP).
Edge and agent technology enable the bundling of flexible micro power plants and the creation of interfaces for the redispatch process in this regard. Blockchain, SSI and ZKP are intended to ensure transparent verification and billing, along with sovereign data exchange that upholds data protection and privacy. The results of the potential assessment are used primarily for further scientific development and to provide guidance to the electricity industry and policymakers. Secondly, they are employed to enhance energy services and, in the long term, optimise transmission grid operation. In addition, the project results are incorporated into existing norms and standards and the preparation of new norms and standards.

Challenge and innovation
Integrating millions of distributed generation, consumption and storage units into the energy system heightens the demand for reliable coordination, unit-specific verification and precise billing. Due to the diversity in terms of both the number and technology of micro-flexibilities to be integrated into grid management in the medium and long term, the exchange of constant and continuously changing data (master and transaction data) must be further automated and designed to be trustworthy.
The project is developing a method for the self-organisation of plant pools for this purpose based on a multi-agent system (MAS), which can flexibly combine small to micro units. An intelligent (software) agent is a (largely) autonomous (software) system capable of perceiving its physical and/or virtual environment via sensors and influencing this environment by means of actuators. The MAS developed in the course of the project comprises a large number of intelligent agents that can interact, communicate and coordinate with each other using edge computing and distributed artificial intelligence to collaboratively achieve the defined goals. In this way, the flexible resources of micro systems can be bundled and marketed via a flexibility platform. A technology approach supported by blockchain ensures secure and trustworthy verification that the relevant flexible resources have indeed been made available. To avoid the need to store personal data related to the micro power plants on the blockchain and to preserve the data sovereignty of network participants, DEER is exploring the use of SSI-based and ZKP-based identification and consensus mechanisms.

Use cases
At the end of the project, the groundwork on the multi-agent system and data-minimal verification will be implemented as a prototype. This prototype is then evaluated in a field test using criteria defined during the course of the project. The aim, in particular, is to test the overall functionality and individual interfaces between the multi-agent system, verification management, and flexibility platform and to be able to draw conclusions about scalability to larger systems.

Consortium
Fraunhofer FIT Business Informatics department (FIT WI) (consortium leader), OFFIS e.V. - Institute for Information Technology, be.storaged GmbH, TenneT TSO GmbH, OLI Systems GmbH, DKE German Commission for Electrical, Electronic & Information Technologies of DIN and VDE, UBIMET (Austria)

Benefits