Energy Service Providers Research Articles

ESCО IN THE FIELD OF HOUSING AND COMMUNAL ECONOMY OF MODERN UKRAINE: EXPERIENCE AND PROSPECTS

The article highlights and summarizes the experience of ESCOs in the field of housing and communal services of modern Ukraine and identifies further theoretical and practical prospects for its improvement and development. The main conditions for the development of ESCOs in modern Ukraine are clarified. Ways to increase the level of energy efficiency and energy saving in the field of housing and communal services of modern Ukraine are proposed. The potential of energy saving in modern Ukraine is revealed. Further, prospects for the improvement and development of energy services and ESCOs in the field of housing and communal services of modern Ukraine are identified. The current concept of ESCO is given. The concept of energy service and the essence of the concept of energy service are revealed. ESCOs have been identified - barriers (budgetary, economic, institutional, motivational, technical, financial) that need to be addressed by law. Manifestations of unscrupulous behavior of energy service providers at the stages of implementation of the ESCO mechanism have been clarified. Prerequisites and tools for influencing the unscrupulous behavior of energy service providers are identified. Areas for improving the regulatory framework for ESCOs (access to finance, incentives for investment, coordination of supply and demand, promotion of the ESCO market), recommendations for further steps for each of the identified areas. Models of ESCO mechanism are described (widespread - classical, innovative - deepened partnership, perspective - ESCO - energy management). The content of the project on thermal modernization and energy efficiency measures in the buildings of housing and communal services (project goals, main measures, sources of funding, efficiency) is revealed. Keywords: state regulation, public administration, energy efficiency, energy saving, energy saving (energy efficient) measures, energy service, ESCO, ESCO barriers, ESCO mechanism, housing and communal services, models of ESCO mechanism, thermal modernization projects.

Формування цифрового комунікативного середовища з надання енергетичних послуг на засадах кліматично нейтрального розвитку

The setting of sustainable development goals is directed towards improving the level and quality of life of the population by reducing anthropogenic impact on the environment and transition to a climate-neutral development. One of the ways to address this issue is to popularize alternative energy sources, introduce energy-efficient technologies and energy management. In view of this, the article is concerned with determining the peculiarities of the formation of a communicative environment for the provision of the climate-neutral energy services as result of the use of digital technologies. The expansion of the range of innovative energy services is due to the diversification of energy sources. As a result of the analysis of the dynamics of the development of «green» energetics, on the basis of statistical data, positive dynamics of energy production from renewable sources is established (wind, solar, hydroelectric power plants, biofuels, and waste). In turn, in terms of considering aspects of digitalization of production processes and provision of services, a low level of information and media activities on the possibilities of obtaining «green» energy services by the population is identified. In view of this, the value of using digital technologies such as mobile (social) platforms is increasing. It is proposed, concerning the content component of the formation of a digital communicative environment for the provision of energy services on the basis of climate-neutral development, to use a rating assessment of energy service companies, the level of digitalization of business processes of enterprises and the formation of digital skills among consumers of different segments of the energy market, as well as a cybernetic approach to determining the ability to provide innovative energy services.

Digital Twin (DT) in Smart Energy Systems - Systematic Literature Review of DT as a growing solution for Energy Internet of the Things (EIoT)

In the industry 4.0 era, the Smart Energy System (SES) should be able to address the emerging challenges of digitization and socioeconomic/ecologic transition along with other critical entities of the society. However, because of the complexity of this system, both researchers and practitioners are seeking an agile and smart solution. The main motive of this review is to investigate the applications and implementation of Digital Twin (DT) in the provision of energy services. Research Questions (RQ) of this study include: RQ1: What are the applications of DT in SES and how effective is DT in that use case of EIoT? RQ2: Which issues of an SES can be addressed efficiently by using DT? Through answering the mentioned questions, the current study is heading to following objectives (O), O1: Describe the state of the art of DT in SES. O2: Develop a direction for energy 4.0 management through listing the applications, challenges and important factors of implementing DTs. O3: Provide a list of various approaches in employing DT in the scope of SES. The current study is a systematic literature review (SLR), based on SCOPUS, WOS and IEEE digital libraries. Two keywords (namely “Digital Twin” and “Energy Systems”) have been first used. To achieve the final list of articles, 2 levels of screening have been conducted. The first Screening was based on the relevance of the results concerning research objectives. The second screening was an abstract study. The exclusion/inclusion criteria in the abstract study were based on the research questions. The papers that have the potential of answering one of the research questions have been included. Since the implementation of DT is a rather new topic, both backward snowballing and forward snowballing strategies are implemented to finalize the article selection phase. 60 articles identified by searching through scientific databases and 11 articles have been appended to the list during the snowballing process. The results of the current review provide a managerial guideline for practitioners that are heading to utilize DT, along with an anthology of DT within SES scope to feed possible future studies.

Research on the Software of Planning Assisted Decision of Park Integrated Energy System

According to the characteristics of multi-demand of integrated energy customers, multi-faceted projects and complex technology categories, a decision-making software for integrated energy system planning is proposed. By constructing the investment income model of the energy system in the park, the software realizes the accurate planning of the capacity of the integrated energy system and the accurate evaluation of the investment income of the energy system, which provides the auxiliary decision support for the energy end users, the energy service providers and so on. The software realizes the intelligent optimization of the planning scheme through the optimization algorithm, and realizes the optimal planning capacity and investment income of the integrated energy system in the park. The software enriches the means of energy system planning and design, and improves the efficiency of planning.

Sudan – Land, Climate, Energy, Agriculture and Development: A Study in the Sudano-Sahel Initiative for Regional Development, Jobs, and Food Security

Sudan is situated in Sub-Saharan Africa, covering an area of about 1.9 million km2 and has a population of 43 million. It is regarded as one of the countries in the world where human development is least advanced with a poverty rate of about 46%. Sudan’s economy is based on agriculture, which contributes about one-third of the (GDP). Sudan’s agriculture has three distinct crop and three distinct livestock production systems. The Crop production systems are: irrigated, traditional and mechanized rain-fed farming. The livestock production systems are: nomadic, transhumant and sedentary systems. The annual cultivated land is around 20 million hectares, more than 85% of which are rain-fed. The livestock population is estimated at 105 million heads concentrated in nomadic and transhumant production systems. Water resources in Sudan are: river Nile and its tributaries, seasonal streams, underground water and surface water. Sources of energy are: biomass; electricity (hydro and fossil fuels) and petroleum products, accounting for about 78,8% and 14%, respectively, of the total energy balance. Sudan has significant renewable energy resources. Particularly solar energy is well distributed all over the country thus having the potential to facilitate the provision of energy services to rural settlements. Sudanese land cover classes indicated that 51% of the country area is bare rocks and soil, agriculture land is 13%, and tree cover and herbaceous vegetation cover 36% of the total Sudan area. The annual crop cultivated area is around 20 million ha and the main crops occupying more than 90% of the cultivated area are sorghum, millet, wheat, sesame and groundnut. Rangelands are the backbone of the livelihood of pastoralists and agro-pastoralists producing annually about 73% of the total feed required for national herds. The forest area is about 22 million ha thus comprising three different classes: federal, state, and community/private forests. Sudan is one of the most seriously affected countries by desertification in Africa. Recent GIS and remote sensing results indicated that between 1958 and 2017 the desert boundary was moved more to the south pushing the country into a historical desertification disaster. Several attempts were made to formulate regulations and legislations to combat soil degradation and desertification. However, desertification in Sudan remains a major environmental threat. Sudan is among the most vulnerable countries in the world to climate change, ranking 175th out of 181 countries. Analyses of rainfall and temperature have demonstrated a high rainfall variability and a clear rise in maximum and minimum temperature. Key climate change impacts include: reduced crops and livestock productivity, reduction in the duration of the growing season and socioeconomic impact such as conflict over resources and migration to urban centres. Sudan has implemented several plans and policies which directly relate to climate change adaptation and development priorities. The focus of these plans and policies is: food security and raising productivity, reducing poverty and enhancing adaptation and resilience to climate change, protecting and developing natural resources, land tenure problems and strengthening governance and institutional capacity. These interventions had limited success in achieving their objectives. The main reasons are: a lack of political stability and fluctuating economic and financial policies as well as weak administrative and implementation capacity of the government institutions. The main lessons learnt are: agricultural-development programmes require increased and more effective public and private partnerships involving the main stakeholders. The low flow of finance to the agricultural sector remains one of the obstacles of agricultural growth. In addition to the poor rural infrastructure, the ongoing conflicts and social unrest in many parts of the country are strongly impacting the performance of the economy and constraining the development plans and policies.

Analysis of the energy service in non-interconnected zones of Colombia using business intelligence

This work aims to evaluate the provision of energy services in non-interconnected zones (NIZ) between 2018 and 2019 using open data from the Colombian government and business intelligence methodolo...

Blockchain-Based Decentralized Virtual Power Plants of Small Prosumers

The deployment of small-scale renewable energy sources will transform the management of energy grids towards more decentralized solutions in which the prosumers will have a more active role. Regulatory and market barriers are driving the implementation of virtual aggregation models in which the small-scale prosumers work together on a larger scale to gain benefits that could not be obtained on an individual basis. In this paper, we propose to use public blockchain and self-enforcing smart contracts to construct Virtual Power Plants (VPPs) of prosumers to provide energy services. A model has been defined for capturing the prosumer level constraints in terms of available energy profiles and energy service requirements enabling their optimal aggregation in hierarchical structures. A lightweight decentralized solution for VPPs construction is implemented using smart contracts enabling its efficient running on the public blockchain. Smart contracts are encoding the model constraints and are defining functionalities for prosumers to initiate or join a VPP implementing the complete chain of Offer-Operate-Measure-Remunerate actions. The VPP will be managed on top of a distributed ledger technology offering decentralized functionality for tracking and validating the delivery of energy based on the blockchain transactions and for energy and financial settlement, the remuneration being done according to the amount of energy provided by individual prosumers. Experimental results show that the proposed solution runs successfully on the public blockchain with good execution time and can address Balancing Responsible Party requests for additional generation. The overhead in terms of gas consumption and transactional throughput stays within reasonable boundaries.

Short-Term Electric Load Forecasting of Integrated Energy System Considering Nonlinear Synergy Between Different Loads

As an efficient form of energy utilization, an integrated energy system integrates oil, natural gas, coal, and other energy sources and converts them into electric, cooling, and heating for users through energy conversion devices. In this process, integrated energy service providers need to make energy conversion decisions based on users' demand information feedback. Therefore, there is uncertainty and coupling between the electric cooling and heating loads, making it difficult to forecast the loads accurately. Firstly, this paper analyzes the integrated energy system's energy consumption characteristics and the interaction mechanism between the supply and demand sides, which fundamentally explains the coupling relationship between different loads of the integrated energy system. Secondly, REC, DEC, REH, and DEH are constructed from electric cooling and heating loads. The relationship between electric load and cooling and heating load is analyzed by a scatter distribution diagram and maximum information coefficient method. The nonlinear correlation between electric load and cooling and heating loads is proved. Based on this, the integrated energy system's synergetic electric load forecasting formula reflecting the nonlinear synergistic effect between loads is proposed. Finally, based on stacking ensemble learning, an integrated energy system electric load forecasting model considering the nonlinear synergy between loads is established by integrating BP neural network, support vector regression, random forest, and gradient boosting decision tree. Through the experimental analysis of the Arizona State University Tempe campus's integrated energy system project, it is found that the effect of the synergistic quadratic forecasting is better than that of the primary forecasting. Besides, the MAPE of the quadratic synergistic forecasting formula is lower than that of the other two forms, indicating that the proposed synergistic electric load forecasting formula considering the nonlinear synergy between loads can improve the accuracy of electric load forecasting of the integrated energy system.

Transactive Energy-Based Joint Optimization of Energy and Flexible Reserve for Integrated Electric-Heat Systems

Implementing integrated electric-heat systems (IEHSs) with coupled power distribution networks and district heating networks is an essential means to solve current energy problems. However, prosumers with multiple energy forms coupled and renewable energy sources with natural uncertainties pose challenges to the operation of IEHSs. This paper proposes a joint energy and reserve dispatch model for IEHSs based on transactive energy, which is a coordinated combination of a bi-level Stackelberg game and two-stage robust optimization. The bi-level Stackelberg game is used to realize the equilibrium of interests among three transacting parties, namely, integrated energy service provider (IESP), multi-carrier prosumer (MCP), and load aggregator (LA). The two-stage robust optimization is employed to ensure the reliability of the system operation under renewable energy uncertainty. In the upper level of the Stackelberg game, the IESP perform pricing and reserve dispatch, while the MCP and LA maximize their benefits via energy management in the lower level. Linearization techniques are utilized to approximate the bi-level Stackelberg game model into a single-level mixed-integer linear programming problem. The converted single-level game model is subsequently regarded as the first stage, while the real-time feasibility check is regarded as the second stage to form a two-stage robust optimization model, which is solved by a modified C&CG algorithm. Case studies demonstrate that the proposed joint energy and reserve dispatch method effectively achieves economic and reliable operation.

Analysis of Performance and Control of DC Microgrids as Electricity Providers for Renewable Energy

The increase in demand for electrical energy is increasing rapidly, in line with economic growth. In developing the electricity system, electrical energy service providers must provide electrical energy according to demand with good quality. The generation of conventional electric energy systems that use fossil fuels faces depleting fossil fuel sources, poor efficiency, and environmental pollution. This technology is known as Distributed Generation (DG). Distributed Generation (DG) or Micro Grid (MG) is a small-scale power plant located close to the load. The use of distributed generators can improve the entire system's efficiency, reduce transmission losses, reduce pollution, and ensure the continuity of the distribution of electrical energy. However, the drastic increase in the use of DG causes problems in the form of voltage and frequency stability which will be disturbed due to rapid changes in the generation and loading rates. If this is left unchecked, it can harm system security and reliability. A proper control strategy will restore system stability in the event of an imbalance.

Analysis of integrated energy customers under the background of energy revolution

China’s rapid economic development has brought a series of environmental problems, which seriously threaten people’s production and life. Driving the energy revolution and building clean and safe energy systems have become an important part of China’s sustainable development. As a crucial means to reduce energy cost and improve energy efficiency, integrated energy service has been gradually developed in recent years. In this context, how to manage the integrated energy customers and improve their satisfaction and loyalty has become an urgent problem to be solved. This paper applies the method of high dimensional data clustering (HDDC) to study this issue. Moreover, a case study has been analysed to illustrate the suitability and effectiveness of the proposed framework with the daily electricity consumption data of industrial enterprises. This paper has practical value for the integrated energy service providers.

The cost load regulation and management of electrical energy by directions of impact on the components of total price

The issues of optimizing regional pricing are especially acute for the Kaliningrad Region due to its exclave features. At the same time, the cost of energy resources has become one of the main issues in making managerial decisions. Recently, the so-called Technoparks have become one of the new forms of organizing the production process in a certain branch of industry, or a process that is at the junction of several branches. There are a variety of descriptions of the indisputable advantages of this work format for a specific technological process, however, the possibilities in the field of reducing the costs of consumed energy resources that arise with such a local siting of production are not discussed that often. According to the authors of the article, based on the structure of the tariff, it is possible to classify methods of reducing the cost price by the impact on the components of the final cost of energy supply services. It should be noted that the classification sign of saving methods will be precisely the component of the tariff, while the methods themselves can be aimed both at reducing the price expression of each component of the tariff and at the volume of services for this component. The authors have also identified regional features of the pricing processes in the energy industry.

Numerical Modeling of Solid and Gaseous Fuel Combustion in the TP-14A Boiler Furnace to Reduce PCDD/F and Greenhouse Gas Emissions

The issues related to the emission of atmospheric pollutants during the provision of energy supply services and the circulation of household waste in settlements are considered. The ways of air pollution by toxic compounds and the formation of greenhouse gases with existing methods of waste heat treatment are analyzed. The issues of reducing the content of toxic emissions in combustion products are studied on the basis of a numerical experiment by means of computational fluid dynamics (CFD). The combustion processes in the power boiler TP-14A (E 220/100) are considered and adequate boundary conditions for the processes of aerodynamics, heat transfer and combustion of gas fuel are determined. The temperature, velocity and concentration fields in the furnace of the investigated boiler have been determined. According to the results of the calculations performed, the formation of chemical underburning and nitrogen oxides is predicted.

Using digital technologies in energy industry

Within the framework of one of the main directions of the implementation of the state program “Digital Kazakhstan”, the digitalization of the economic sectors is envisaged, the tasks of which include the construction and effective functioning of an intelligent energy system. The modern global economy is undergoing a cultural shift towards digital transformation, where the main processes are being transferred to digital businesses, which are providing technical optimization, new revenue streams and opportunities for creating value. The authors of the article consider the issues of introducing digital technologies into the activities of enterprises in the energy industry. It is noted that, despite the understanding of the relevance of digitalization, the digital maturity of industry enterprises is still insufficient, which increases the importance of combining industry enterprises in a consortium.This article substantiates the use of digital technologies in the energy sector to solve traditional problems: coverage of services of energy companies in all regions of the country, ensuring an uninterrupted and sufficient volume of energy supply services, reducing the price level and protecting the environment. The authors identified and substantiated the main factors of the digital transformation of energy systems: digitalization, decentralization and decarbonization. The article formulates the criteria for the transition of an enterprise to the digital status and notes its advantages. The article outlines the main digital transformation technologies and their application features: artificial intelligence, blockchain, Big Data and data management. It presents the facts of foreign practice of digitalization of the energy industry.

SPDS: A Secure and Auditable Private Data Sharing Scheme for Smart Grid Based on Blockchain

The exponential growth of data generated from increasing smart meters and smart appliances brings about huge potentials for more efficient energy production, pricing, and personalized energy services in smart grids. However, it also causes severe concerns due to improper use of individuals' private data, as well as the lack of transparency and auditability for data usage. To bridge this gap, in this article, we propose a secure and auditable private data sharing (SPDS) scheme under data processing-as-a-service mode in smart grid. Specifically, we first present a novel blockchain-based framework for trust-free private data computation and data usage tracking, where smart contracts are employed to specify fine-grained data usage policies (i.e., who can access what kinds of data, for what purposes, at what price) while the distributed ledgers keep an immutable and transparent record of data usage. A trusted execution environment based off-chain smart contract execution mechanism is exploited as well to process confidential user datasets and relieve the computation overhead in blockchain systems. A two-phase atomic delivery protocol is designed to ensure the atomicity of data transactions in computing result release and payment. Furthermore, based on contract theory, the optimal contracts are designed under information asymmetry to stimulate user's participation and high-quality data sharing while optimizing the payoff of the energy service provider. Extensive simulation results demonstrate that the proposed SPDS can effectively improve the payoffs of participants, compared with conventional schemes.

Balancing climate and development goals

Decarbonizing the energy system is a major challenge facing the richest countries, whereas provision of energy services is a major challenge facing the poorest countries. What would be the climate consequences if only richer countries focus on decarbonization, and only poorer countries focus on provision of energy services? To address this question, we create future scenarios in which carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions increase according to a historical trend and then start to decline only when countries reach specified income levels. In our central case, we assume that when countries start to decarbonize, they reduce emissions at 2% yr−1. With this assumption and if all countries begin to decarbonize in 2020, the world would be expected to warm by 2.0 °C relative to pre-industrial times. If countries begin to decarbonize only when their per capita gross domestic product (GDP) exceeds $10 000, there would be less than 0.3 °C of additional warming. Yet over half the world’s population currently lives in countries below such an income threshold, and continued direct CO2 emissions by people who live in these countries, while they remain underdeveloped, would increase global average temperature rise by 14% relative to the case, in which all people begin to decarbonize in 2020. The primary concern of developments driven by fossil fuels in lower income countries might relate to issues such as the technological lock-in to high-emission technologies.

Counting the cost: Coping with tariff increases amidst power supply shortfalls in urban households in Ethiopia

Although affordability is important, people do not need to be money poor to experience energy deprivation. This paper examines how an electricity tariff increase affects household energy consumption by situating the price change within the broader context of energy service provision in Ethiopia. We place households’ lived experience in interaction with the institutional and infrastructural dynamics that constitute the energy sector in Addis Ababa to observe how the price increase intersects with service provision. Since the tariff increase was implemented, households have changed their daily routines to control cost. Our findings show that energy consumption behaviour is also shaped by service-related inadequacies (unreliable supply and frequent power outages). However, families coping capacity (to the tariff increase and power supply shortfalls) is undermined by an energy market that is rife with information asymmetries and uncertainties. Thus, although socioeconomic factors underpin the energy insecurity households experience, inadequate supply, and diminishing confidence in service providing institutions appears to heighten their vulnerability. The paper argues that while the price change has an overall effect on consumption, its impact needs to be seen within the context of its systemic interaction with the broader energy governance and service delivery challenges.

India's sustainable energy future and the challenges for optimised integration of variable energy sources

Renewable energy penetration in India is strongly linked to growing energy consumption, energy security and access to energy. Variable energy sources, viz. solar, small hydro power and wind energy form a significant share of India's energy mix. High intermittency in these technologies can lead to system related operational issues such as varying power quality and unreliability. On the other hand, grid integration of renewable energy projects is essential for bringing about an increase in the renewable component of regional and national energy mix. This paper analyses the existing status, technical and systemic challenges in large scale integration of renewable energy sources. In order to understand the complexities therein, the experiences of renewable energy service providers were supplemented by secondary literature. This paper adopts a system-based view for analysing issues of renewable energy integration and up-scaling for India, encompassing technical, infrastructural, and user specific aspects. It stresses the specific interventions that would bolster system strength and readiness for a renewable rich India. It also highlights key challenges of power quality, constancy and grid balancing and each one's unique position in a sustainable energy future for India.

An incentive-compatible distributed integrated energy market mechanism design with adaptive robust approach

The transactive energy framework was proposed in the recent years to enable the distributed energy trading among distributed integrated energy market. However, sharing energy might lead to profit loss to some participants. As a result, the incentive of joining the coalition for some participants will be diminished. Currently, researches have focused on encouraging participants to share energy by offering compensation, but the incentive compatibility is not modeled effectively. To address this problem, this paper, for the first time, develops an optimization model for the market organizer (i.e., the integrated energy service provider) to allocate the cooperative surplus according to the market contribution while the crucial attributes of the market mechanism are ensured (i.e., social welfare maximization, individual rationality, cost recovery and incentive compatibility), so that market participants can earn their fair shares and profit reductions can be circumvented. On the other hand, the problem caused by the highly uncertain and intermittent power outputs from distributed renewable energy resources imposes additional challenge for organizing a transactive energy market, which calls for the exploitations of effective algorithms to identify representative scenarios. In this paper, adaptive robust optimization algorithm is adopted to identify the scenarios that enhances conservativeness and economy and improves the efficiency of market clearing process, which transforms the problem into a tri-level model and solves by iterating between internal and external formulations. Simulation results show that social welfare increases $2,751 compared with independent operation mode, and calculation efficiency can be improved by 71.55% utilizing the ARO method.

Double-layer energy management system based on energy sharing cloud for virtual residential microgrid

The idea of energy sharing can contribute to achieving the goal of resource optimization by redistributing and sharing idle energy assets. How to design an appropriate energy management strategy in the energy sharing environment has been the focus of intensive research in energy sharing field. In this paper, a new effective double-layer energy management system (EMS) based on the energy sharing cloud (ESC) is developed for a virtual residential microgrid (VRMG). The proposed ESC can be regarded as an open energy sharing environment, where the cloud platform helps cloud users build their VRMGs by providing energy services including renewable energy sources (RESs) generation and energy storage. The mathematical model of the VRMG is formulated, and the energy service prices for RESs generation and energy storage are monthly set separately. Moreover, considering the changes in household load and RESs generation, an energy management strategy of double-layer EMS is designed. The upper-layer EMS helps VRMG obtain the monthly optimal capacity configuration of RESs and energy storage, and the lower-layer EMS realizes the daily electricity scheduling optimization for the VRMG whose objectives are to minimize the total operational cost and maximize the electrical comfort level. Simulation studies demonstrate that the proposed energy sharing mechanism can meet the changing energy needs of the cloud user, and numerical experiments also confirm the performance and effectiveness of the proposed double-layer EMS.