Abstract

Large penetration of distributed generation from variable renewable energy sources, increased consumption flexibility on the demand side and the electrification of transportation pose great challenges to existing and future electric distribution networks. This thesis studies the roles of several actors involved in electric distribution systems through electricity consumption data analysis and simulation models. Results show that real-time electricity pricing adoption in the residential sector offers economic benefits for end consumers. This occurs even without the adoption of demand-side management strategies, while real-time pricing also brings new opportunities for increasing consumption flexibility. This flexibility will play a critical role in the electrification of transportation, where scheduled charging will be required to allow large penetration of EVs without compromising the network's reliability and to minimize upgrades on the existing grid. All these issues add significant complexity to the existing infrastructure and conventional passive components are no longer sufficient to guarantee safe and reliable network operation. Active distribution networks are therefore required, and consequently robust and flexible modelling and simulation computational tools are needed for their optimal design and control. The modelling approach presented in this thesis offers a viable solution by using an equation-based object-oriented language that allows developing open source network component models that can be shared and used unambiguously across different simulation environments. 

Abstract

International audience; Distribution system operators' roles are evolving from a "fit-and-forget" approach towards an active management of their distribution grid. With this approach flexibility management at the local level can defer or avoid costly reinforcements and have a more efficient use of existing assets. Flexibility tenders are emerging as a mechanism that allow DSOs to procure flexibility for the medium to long term. This works proposed a modular framework to analyze the market rules of local flexibility tenders for the participation of distributed energy resources (DER), with a particular focus on demand response and electric vehicles, and applied it to the case study of UKPN's flexibility 2018/2019 tender and Enedis proposal for flexibility procurement. These tenders have been built to allow the participation of DER, but still there are barriers that may hinder their optimal participation, especially regarding connection procedures and baseline definition.

Abstract

International audience; Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs), or Evolutionary Computation, are powerful algorithms that have been used in a range of challenging real-world problems. In this paper, we are interested in their applicability on a dynamic and complex problem borrowed from Demand-Side Management (DSM) systems, which is a highly popular research area within smart grids. DSM systems aim to help both end-use consumer and utility companies to reduce, for instance, peak loads by means of programs normally implemented by utility companies. In this work, we propose a novel mechanism to design an autonomous intelligent DSM by using (EV) electric vehicles' batteries as mobile energy storage units to partially fulfill the energy demand of dozens of household units. This mechanism uses EAs to automatically search for optimal plans, representing the energy drawn from the EVs' batteries. To test our approach, we used a dynamic scenario where we simulated the consumption of 40 and 80 household units over a period of 30 working days. The results obtained by our proposed approach are highly encouraging: it is able to use the maximum allowed energy that can be taken from each EV for each of the simulated days. Additionally, it uses the most amount of energy whenever it is needed the most (i.e., high-peak periods) resulting into reduction of peak loads.