Location
Description
More than 250 people work at the Technopole, ENTROPY's demo site in Sierre (Switzerland), which is composed of 50 enterprises including HES-SO research institutes' labs and offices, a restaurant, a fitness room and multiple classrooms. Technopole’s energy system is composed of two microgrids based on solar energy since Sierre is the sunniest city in Switzerland. The 1,200 m2 photovoltaic panels produce 207 kWp of solar energy.
The possible users targeted for the ENTROPY project are the visitors of the Technopole’s restaurant, the HES-SO school in Sierre (1000 students) and the HES-SO site in the Technopole which is composed of 3 institutes: Information Systems (80 people), Tourism (26 people) and Entrepreneurship and Management (20 people).
Energy and smart metering related infrastructures
HES-SO has already developed an information system which collects both low frequency parameters (load curves from the photovoltaic plant provided by ELKO and the microgrids consumption provided by Sierre Energy, the local electricity provider) and high frequency parameters (device measures from the Ecowizz smart meters). Energy consumption is collected at different levels: at the low voltage transformer, at the PV panels, at different buildings of the Technopole and at companies offices. For each data collection, the active and reactive powers from the three phases are available each second.
The thermal heating based on gas and the heat pump for the air conditioning are also monitored and controlled. In addition, a new generation lithium-titanate battery with a capacity/power of 25kWh/25 kW stores the extra-photovoltaic production when available and delivers back the energy when the solar production is low. Finally, a weather station collects humidity, luminous intensity, pressure, wind and temperature every minute.
A consequence of this testbed is the development of a website which enables to follow in real-time the production and consumption through: http://www.technopole-vert.ch. This information is also presented in multiple screens deployed in the common areas of the building, in order to evaluate in long term the impact on users behaviours. When PV production is above the cumulative consumption curves, the storage is activated. When PV production is too low for the buildings consumption, the battery is used to compensate the extra need of power.
Research activities based on the microgrid
- Electric appliances detection
The current deployment extracts the usage patterns for electricity out of load curves by using classifiers that extract the load curve of one device using single signature and the global signature. In addition, the Ecowizz smart meters, based on ZigBee, are also used to collect information of the power consumption for specific devices in order to have also fine grain awareness of the power consumed by specific devices and carry out fine grain monitoring. In particular, over 100 smart meters are deployed in the Technopole 3-5 and 10 offices. Thereby, fine grain monitoring is being carried out.
- IoT technologies
The testbed is also used for testing a set of novel IoT technologies on electric devices in a “smart office” developpemnt context. This work is in coordination with Sierre Energy network for the proper integration between the microgrids and the smart grid.
- Consumption and production prediction
Models based on hybrid non-intrusive approaches and machine learning enables us to use the active/reactive power to identify the different appliances, the profile of the different seasons and the working days. Moreover, the usage of the data from the smart meters allow us to predict the energy consumption and the solar panels production in a time windows of fifteen minutes which is a clue information to carry appropriate actions to increase the Technopole’s own consumption and decrease the consumption from the grid.