The 2021 edition of the International Symposium on Communications for Energy Systems (ComForEn) in Vienna has been performed in a hybrid setting. It was attended by stakeholders and participants to thematically related R&D projects.
For two days, the 70 participants listened to 21 presentations and workshops on “Design”, “How to Energy Community?”, “ICT Solutions for Energy Communities across Europe”, “Reduction of the complexity of ICT systems” and a Workshop on „BIFROST – A narrative simulation tool for Smart Energy scenarios”.
The Institute of Computer Technology at TU Wien was represented with presentations, challenge participations, and a workshop.
ICT Solutions for Energy Communities across Europe – Session Chair: Stefan Wilker
Stefan Wilker chaired the session on „ICT Solutions for Energy Communities across Europe“. With speakers from Austria, Germany, Ireland, UK and France, solutions and approaches have been presented in relation to this session. All participants highly appreciated to learn from each others solutions and the possibility to discuss questions to specific regulations of the different states.
SONDER – presentation by Gerald Franzl
The ERA-Net SES project SONDER presented an approach to model and assess energy flexibility on the customer level. These flexibilities are not always available at all times and every day. Aggregating many can improve the reliability of offers. Millions of these volatile flexibilities appear needed to compensate the volatility introduced by thousands of small RES like residential wind and solar power required for the energy transition.
Bifrost Workshop – held by Daniel Hauer, Franz Zeilinger (Siemens), Isabella Illes, Valentin Alber & Benjamin Thomann
BIFROST is a narrative Smart Grid simulation tool for exploring, building, and presenting stories about settlements, communities, and quarters pushing to adapt to the climate crisis. It offers simulation orchestration and creative tools to quickly investigate variegated scenarios, with the ultimate goals of reducing complexity and presenting technological solutions. In our workshop, the participants built and explored their own Energy Community.
Self-Optimization-Challenge – Valentin Bauer & Thomas Leopold participated for the project SONDER
In future smart grids, small communities of prosumers could buy and sell energy between its members. We explored the potential cost savings of such communities in ComForEn’s Self-Optimization challenge.
Short on time but not on ideas, we took to the challenge of minimizing the costs of a virtual community and felt the excitement of seeing our controlling algorithm run and are happy to report cost savings!
You can find more information about ComForEn 2021 here: www.comforen.org
