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2020
Conference Paper
Titel
Digital Energy. Keynote
Abstract
In the presence of climate change, the need for less carbon-intensive renewable energy is obvious, equally for households and energy-intensive industries. At the same time, the growth of solar and wind energy implies much more temporal and geographic fluctuation and volatility between electrical energy supply and demand. Local balancing can reduce the need for expensive and controversial long-range high voltage lines, but the huge growth of small and medium energy prosumers also places high demand on flexible and scalable planning and control, as well as revised business models. The need for multiple kinds of digital solutions ranging from modeling and simulation, to sensing, communication and control software is obvious and under active investigation. However, neither network operators nor individual players will rely on simulations along, yet real large-scale experiments testing how realistic the simulations are hard to conduct in the fully connected electricity networks. And, of course, digitization of this critical infrastructure creates new hazards in terms of IT security that must be mitigated. Last not least, experience not just in the current Corona crisis has shown how tricky the design of stable business and public support models for renewable can be. While most of these issues individually have been subject to quite a bit of research, we see a need to bring the required cross-disciplinary competencies together in a coherent strategic setting. The recently founded Fraunhofer Center Digital Energy at RWTH Aachen University brings together leading researchers in the theory and practice of renewable electrity networks, software support for smart grid and energy-saving strategies in home and factories, IT security, and business administration in order to investigate seamless solutions from the business model and process level all the way down to physical electricity networks. The talk will illustrate these issues by a number of recent projects, including e.g. flexibilization of industrial demand, blockchain solutions for small-scale energy trading, protection of digitized networks against hacker attacks, and others.