OpenLV has been presented at CIRED, Slovenia, through the writing of a paper, and a poster session, achieving international dissemination about the ground-breaking project.
There were around 400 attendees from 33 countries, ranging from Japan to the US, with 223 papers being accepted at the conference from 406 submitted.
Richard Potter, OpenLV Project Manager, who attended the workshop, commented “This event really showed the potential for the LV-CAPTM technology to make a real difference to local energy communities to maximise the potential of their distributed generation resources – not just in the GB market, but internationally.”
‘CIRED’ is derived from Congrès International des Réseaux Electriques de Distribution; in English, the International Conference on Electricity Distribution. CIRED runs workshops on specific topics every two years between CIRED main conferences. The 2018 workshop in Ljubljana, Slovenia, addressed ‘Microgrids and local energy communities’.
Microgrids and local energy communities can have a significant impact on distribution system development, and may offer a number of important advantages for the end-users and for the utilities. Customers and producers have the potential to reduce energy costs, improve service continuity and bidding system services and flexibility. Distribution system operators may reduce or postpone investments, increase hosting capacity and improve quality of services. A proper regulatory framework has to be designed to allow them to bring these expected benefits to the various stakeholders, while maintaining an effective market operation, making sure there is no negative impact on the overall cost base and avoiding unfair cross-subsidisation.
This is the reason why this CIRED workshop focused on microgrids, i.e. electricity distribution systems containing loads and distributed energy resources (such as distributed generators, storage devices, or controllable loads), that can be operated in a controlled, coordinated way, whether they are:
- Isolated microgrids, which only function in an island mode
- Embedded microgrids, which can be controlled either while connected to the main power network or while islanded
- Local energy communities, which comprise consumers cooperating for the satisfaction of their energy needs using local production sources, and which are not designed to operate in an island mode.
For more information, visit the CIRED website.
Richard Potter has also presented about OpenLV at Regen’s Smart Energy Marketplace 2018 event, which took place on 19 June 2018 in Exeter, as part of the session entitled ‘Democratic, decentralised and decarbonised energy systems’.
