The pilot comprised a local energy system – an urban district – within the Lisbon Naval Base.
The site offered the opportunity to optimise eNeuron’s electricity system operation with other energy carriers. In addition to electricity, these included heating and cooling, transport and industry in a sector-coupling approach, increasing the hosting capacity for RES at local level. The hub’s border was a MV/MV substation, since the military facility had its own distribution grid.
The substation powers two different networks:
– a 6kV / 50Hz network, comprising residential and industrial loads – naval station buildings and the department of propulsion and energy workshops
– a 6kV / 60Hz network, comprising the docks and the battleships.
From the different types of loads available we may consider, lighting circuits, HVAC systems, boilers, and industrial appliances, e.g., ovens. Distributed generation and other energy resources to consider were: ship’s diesel generators and batteries, PV systems in car parks and buildings’ rooftops and an electric vehicle charging station.
The high-level management architecture proposed for the local energy system was based on a master-slave approach, where a system aggregator for the entire hub coordinated and managed micro Energy Hubs, i.e., small scale systems comprising a secondary-substation and its LV circuits, or a small campus and its cluster of buildings.
Slave micro Energy Hubs was governed in an automated way, targeting a certain degree of self-optimisation and functional independence, taking into consideration the characteristics of the available assets and flexibility. The main applications to explore was:
- Local energy and flexibility forecasting;
- Peer-to-peer energy and flexibility trading;
- Local system optimisation for ancillary services to the MV grid connection node – to avoid congestion of local active grid and to support voltage.