SEN
System for monitoring and managing the production and consumption of a low-voltage power grid.
The Social Electrical Network (SEN) project is a system for monitoring and managing production and consumption within a low-voltage electrical grid.
The SEN project is not intended to install new PV/wind power plants/cogeneration, but to optimize the output of pre-existing plants and share the energy produced socially, among peers.
Nowadays, the infrastructure of the Italian transmission grid provides for energy production to come from the provider to consumers, and only with the inclusion of so-called prosumers (producers and consumers) in the grid has the possibility of small producers, who were previously only consumers, producing energy and selling it to the provider also become apparent.
This new configuration is not only economically disadvantageous for the small producer who sees the sale price equal to one third of the purchase price, but also from the point of view of transporting this energy, which, produced at low voltage, will reach the users who need it but with all the heat losses associated with the distance it will have to travel.
The SEN project aims to address these economic and performance drawbacks through HW optimized for energy harvesting and transport in low-voltage grids.
Users in SEN who will have a PV system will not have to sell the energy they produce, and do not consume, to the energy provider but will be able to sell it, e.g., to the other apartments in their apartment building.
Through monitoring, metering, and control software, the system owner will know to whom he or she has sold energy, and will be able to discount the proceeds of this sale directly from his or her condominium installment, rather than selling it to the energy provider with benefits also for the distribution network, which sees reduced balancing expenses associated with random energy inputs into the grid.
Purpose
The goal of the project is to build a Pilot consisting of 3 apartments, connected to SEN as well as to the energy provider’s grid (we do not want to create an island), and to demonstrate how energy produced and not consumed by an apartment equipped with a photovoltaic installation can be used by the other apartments without requiring energy from the provider.
The Pilot is complemented by a SW that allows the management, monitoring and metering of these energy flows in accordance with Italian laws and condominium policy.
Partners
5EMMEINFORMATICA S.p.A. Project Coordinator, with registered office in Via Cristoforo Colombo 256 – 00140 Rome (RM) 5minformatica.it/.
He is in charge of defining the requirements for the design and implementation of the SEN ECU management and control module and specifically will be responsible for:
- of the design of the databases (SQL/NOSQL) used by the architectural components; specifically, optimal structures will be defined based on the nature of the data being processed (user data, energy consumption data, billing data), and of the definition of the application layer of services for data access and manipulation;
- of the development of ETL processes for application data management; the processes will have to consider the possibility of integration between different types of databases (SQL and NOSQL) and possible data transformation operations; that of the development of the software layer for application data management; the sw layer developed will aim to mask the complexity of the data structures used and simultaneously make the various types of data (energy, billing, user, system status) usable to all architecture components.
5EMMEINFORMATICA S.p.A. will receive a grant of €150,600.00 against recognized expenses of €225,166.17.
MASHFROGPLUS S.r.L., headquartered at 400 Via Giacomo Peroni – 00131 Rome, http://www.mashfrog.com/it. He is in charge of scenario and requirements design, especially taking care of the implementation of the platform for the management of administrative data related to energy consumption, in fact a billing system connectable to operational payment management platforms.
He/she will also provide support in the area of system design, and, development, collaborating on both the definition of requirements and the development of the platform intended to talk to the exchanges and devices (defined in the overall Project Plan as the “SW SEN platform”).
He will also participate in the tests and trials planned in WP5, Test Integration and Results Validation.
Finally, thanks in part to the presence of its Locations in the international arena and with the support of the expert internationalization consultant mentioned below, it will contribute to WP6 for the promotion and commercialization of the results.
MASHFROGPLUS S.r.L will receive a grant of €110,332.55 against recognized expenses of €166,646.70.
TOP CONSULTING & SERVICES S.R.L., headquartered at Via Benedetto Croce, 44 00142 Rome (RM) https://topcs.it/. For the Research phase, the company will resort to collecting specifications (requirements) from potential end users in order to best target the development specifications.
For the subsequent development phase, in which the SW algorithms and the related spatial representation architecture are to be implemented, greater use of in-house personnel is envisaged since this know-how is TOP Consulting & Services’ own.
TOP CONSULTING & SERVICES S.R.L will receive a grant of €200,787.75 against recognized expenses of €268,509.88.
AzzeroCO2R.L., with registered office in Via Genova, 23 – 00184 Rome (RM) https://www.azzeroco2.it/. It is in charge of research activities aimed at the realization of a renewable energy system capable of feeding the SEN system for the efficient distribution of the electricity produced to the connected utilities; to ensure the quality of the results, the company, in addition to contributing to an accurate study of the system requirements, will participate in the identification of significant load profiles for the simulations. The pilot will involve storage and 3 separate utilities (apartments); the management and control system will provide for priority of use by users who are also energy producers over passive users, i.e., those who, not owning RES systems, are only energy users. Such a system can be used both for retrofitting existing systems and for new installations of RES not necessarily photovoltaic. The purpose of the project is to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed solution and thus lay the groundwork for its industrialization and commercialization. The presence of an ESCo within the partnership is also important to facilitate, once the research project is completed, the introduction into the energy services market.
AzzeroCO2S.R.L. will receive a grant of € 94,316.03 against recognized expenses of € 124,475.00.
Department of Electronic Engineering, University of Rome Tor Vergata, with registered office at Via del Politecnico, No. 1 – 00133 Rome (RM) eln.uniroma2.it/.
He is in charge of the design and implementation of the hardware control unit of the SEN platform.
After evaluation by Lazio Innova, the recognized allowable expenditure was € 137,069.75 equal to a grant of € 109,655.79.
Purpose
The project aims to develop the hardware and software components needed to implement the SEN system for energy flow management and in particular:
ECU – Inside the ECU will be installed the command and control logic for a series of electromechanical switches that will allow different utilities to interact with the SEN ECU without ever being disconnected with the energy provider’s grid.
The control unit will ensure that the active utility (equipped with a PV system) not only accounts for its consumption and production, but also routes the energy produced, and not self-consumed, within the storage system instead of feeding it into the grid.
At the same time, the control unit will make the stored energy available to all other passive consumers (not equipped with PV panels), keeping track of who is drawing and how much.
The design of the SEN control unit will be completed with the definition of the interfaces that will make available to the SW platform all the information inherent in production and consumption.
SW platform-The SW platform will feature an intermediate software layer that will be responsible for dialoguing with the SEN control unit. In particular, this intermediate layer will have to provide a module for parsing data from/to the control unit, as well as a scheduler that allows multi-user interaction.
This intermediate module will interact with a DB where all the data coming from/to the control unit will be stored and acting as a DBMS manage the accesses to this information by the software services that will be designed on top of it such as the economic-administrative platform, the visualization engine and the profiling logics of the different users.
SW design will also cover decision support systems.
Finally, the possibility of performing energy profiling of a home will be explored.
The idea arises from the perspective of the smart grid, i.e., the joint use of an information network and electrical distribution to manage electrical energy in a “smart” way, i.e., efficiently for distribution and for its more rational use; such management allows, for example, to minimize possible overloads and variations in electrical voltage around its nominal value.
Energy system-The energy system will be representative of the actual characteristics of residential renewable source systems.
Results
WP1 – Coordination of project.
Objective is to ensure adherence to project timelines (releases of individual deliverables, document and/or prototypes), ensure quality of deliverables and related documentation.
Within this WP all economic and technical issues inherent to variations and/or critical issues that may arise will also be handled.
WP2 – Scenarios and requirements
Within this WP, the foundation for the research and development activities planned for each project objective will be laid.
The scenarios and use cases that will be defined will be used to identify the HW/SW requirements of the SEN platform.
WP3 – System Design
The WP will be responsible for designing the HW/SW architecture of the entire SEN platform:
ECU – Inside the ECU will be installed the command and control logic for a series of electromechanical switches that will allow different utilities to interact with the SEN ECU without ever being disconnected with the energy provider’s grid.
The control unit will ensure that the active utility (equipped with a PV system) will not only be able to account for its consumption and production, but will also route the energy produced, and not self-consumed, within the storage system instead of feeding it into the grid.
At the same time, the control unit will make the stored energy available to all other passive consumers (not equipped with PV panels), keeping track of who is drawing and how much.
The design of the SEN control unit will be completed with the definition of the interfaces that will make available to the SW platform all the information inherent in production and consumption
SW platform-The SW platform will feature an intermediate software layer that will be responsible for dialoguing with the SEN control unit. In particular, this intermediate layer will have to provide a module for parsing data from/to the control unit, as well as a scheduler that allows multi-user interaction.
This intermediate module will interact with a DB where all the data coming from/to the control unit will be stored and acting as a DBMS manage the accesses to this information by the software services that will be designed on top of it such as the economic-administrative platform, the visualization engine and the profiling logics of the different users.
SW design will also cover decision support systems.
Finally, the possibility of performing energy profiling of a home will be explored.
The idea arises from the perspective of the smart grid, i.e., the joint use of an information network and electrical distribution to manage electrical energy in a “smart” way, i.e., efficiently for distribution and for its more rational use; such management allows, for example, to minimize possible overloads and variations in electrical voltage around its nominal value.
Energy system-The energy system will be representative of the actual characteristics of residential renewable source systems.
WP4 – Development
The WP covers the activities of implementing the HW infrastructure and SW platform.
WP5 – Integration, Testing and Validation of Results.
The individual modules developed will first be tested individually; their integration is planned in the activities of this WP to achieve a single solution.
The tests conducted fall into the category of system testing and will allow the SEN consortium to test the infrastructure as a whole while complying with what was established in the developed Scenarios.
WP6 – Commercialization and exploitation of results.
The goal is the implementation of a commercialization plan in Italy and abroad, building on the results obtained from the internationalization activity.
The project in the short term is oriented to the implementation of B2C solutions, but the commercialization plan will also highlight the advantages of the B2B market (mainly in the long term), aimed at energy providers and transmission network operators.
In fact, if in the short to medium term SEN will target condominium installations, in the long term this can be extended to small neighborhoods by going to create localized VPPs powered by the private installations that will no longer feed their excess production into the grid, but will store it in SEN’s storage stations, releasing it to the utilities that request it.
In light of the monitoring results, the general requirements of the energy system, and the basic characteristics of SEN, lines of research for future product development will be identified.
These developments will be functional for the expansion of the market to new types of customers or the realization of a more comprehensive service, such as:
- Interfacing SEN with home automation systems to autonomously manage home appliances so as to maximize SEN’s performance and economic benefits to users;
- management of heat exchange in small district heating networks so as to efficiently connect and control even co-generation systems.
Financial Support Received
The SEN project proposal (CUP F87H18000200007) was submitted on the Public Notice “Green Building and Smart Building” referred to in Det.
n.
G14229 of 30/11/2016 – POR FESR LAZIO 2014 – 2020 – Integrated Projects and was approved by Determination no.
G00511 of 17/01/2018 published in BURL no.
6 of 18/01/2018.
Below are the details of the total grant awarded.
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