Smart Energy Storage
Smart energy trading in function of market price, power consumption and green power production
USE CASE
RBM Team is a former professional racing team, now focused on developing Total Smart Energy Solutions for an industrial environment. Realizing a Smart Energy Storage System (SESS) is a first crucial step. Goal of this system is to optimize energy trading in function of market price, power consumption and green power production:
- When prices are low, energy is purchased and stored in the batteries
- When prices are high, energy is sold and released to the grid
RBM Team already developed the energy management system (EMS) communicating with the battery management system (BMS) and inverter.
SOLUTION
The Energy management system (EMS) itself is not able to make decisions when to sell or buy energy. This decision is made based on the energy price trend and future consumption and production power. This is where we stepped in making the system smart with:
- Data collection from sensors and online sources
- Data analytics to determine when to buy and sell and forecasting of production and consumption power
- Data storage and visualization using our cloud platform
It was a nice collaboration with ART Robotics, they really listened to our wishes and needs, regardless of the multiple loops of optimization the program needed to perform. The combination of their availability and skills resulted in a fine product that helps us in our daily operations.
Data collection
Live data is collected from sensors and online datasources.
Actual power and energy variables are read from sensors such as: power consumption, green power production, grid and inverter power, purchased and injected energy. Currently wired power sensors via Modbus TCP or wireless sensors via MQTT are supported. Historic and forecast data such as belpex prices, weather and power production forecast data are retrieved via API’s or web scraping.
Data analytics
At every moment, the decision to buy or sell energy is evaluated based on the actual and future energy prices. Buy and sell slots are visualized in the figure above in green and red respectively. In order to anticipate energy excess or shortage also power consumption and production trends need to be integrated.
- Power consumption forecasts are calculated using historic data (stored in and retrieved from the database)
- Green power production forecasts are derived from location, weather and solar power forecast data
Cloud platform
The cloud platform is used to store and visualize all data. InfluxDB is used as database to store and retrieve real-time time series data combined with Grafana for interactive analytics and visualization.
Energy storage
Energy management system (EMS) runs on the same client machine and receives all required input data. It communicates with the Battery management system (BMS) via CAN and controls the inverter via Modbus TCP. The same client is able to manage multiple energy storage modules.
