Development of an open-source multi-platform plug and play island energy management system

The competitiveness of renewable island systems has much increased in the recent years since especially costs for PV and batteries decreased. However, applications grow only slowly due to various reasons such as lack of financing tools.

A major component of such a system will be the energy control and management unit. In conventional island systems much of the conventional control like frequency and voltage stability is guaranteed by diesel generators. In systems with a high penetration of renewable power, new control and also new management strategies need to be identified and implemented.

The goal of the project is to develop an energy control and management system which is platform-independent, although we will start with a Raspberry Pi. The tool should be supplied as an open-access tool which can be downloaded from a common project website or a GitHub repository.

The work is distributed in many sub-tasks:

• Project Management
• Power Control Unit / Distributed versus Central Control
• Demand Forecast
• Renewable Supply Forecast / Weather Forecast
• Communication Protocol and System
• Energy Component Library
• Machine Learning Unit
• Open Source Group
• Test Group  

The system will first be tested on the real-time simulator. It will later be applied in field tests mainly in Africa.