Decentralized electric power grid architecture and management for reliable and cost-effective supply (DEZENT)

Given the sharply rising costs for traditional, energy (based on coal, fossil oil or gas etc). over the past few years renewable energy sources such as wind, sun, water, or, seed oil have favorably come into the picture as economically desirable and ecologically clean alternatives. The corresponding power facilities (e.g. wind power stations, solar panels, block beat & power-plants) are widely distributed and are quite heterogeneous regarding their productivity (capacity and reliability) yet at the same time transport paths and cost are at a minimal level. (In the near future it will be possible to cover all needs from such sources). For guaranteeing both the adaptive integration of the diverse facilities and a balanced level of supply under (locally) highly unpredictable energy production we present a bottom-up power grid management architecture. A key novelty of our approach is a completely decentralized management for negotiating the available power supply and needs. This is realized through a safety-critical, real-time multi-agent system where bids and offers are negotiated on the (electrically) shortest time basis of 0.5 sec. While the system is secure against malicious attacks it exhibits a high amount of fault tolerance where the latter corresponds well to the exceptional production safety of the widely distributed facilities. Beyond the high supply reliability under the decentralized management of distributed facilities we demonstrate that both operation costs and consumer prices could be assumed lower than under a centralized management and architecture.