Open source virtual smart grid renewable energy aggregation and sharing concept with a focus on carbon metrics.
A key challenge in developing zero carbon energy systems is matching variable renewable supply with energy demand, including traditional electricity demand and the additional demand resulting from the electrification of heating and transport.
The ZeroCarbonBritain report and 10 year, hourly energy model provides a thoroughly worked out example of how a 100% zero carbon energy system could be possible. Demand is met through a mix of demand shifting, storage technologies at different scales and oversupply.
This virtual micro-grid dashboard concept aims to make it possible to test scenarios such as ZeroCarbonBritain and interim scenarios where the grid is not fully zero carbon in real-time now using data from participating households and national grid supply data. The implications of variable supply and assumptions around how shift-able demand can be can be tested and cross checked with what the models suggest could be possible.
- OpenEnergyMonitor: Household Zero Carbon Energy Model & Context
- ZeroCarbonBritain Report and Model
- ZeroCarbonBritain Web Models and link to spreadsheet model download
- Realtime and historic aggregation of household onsite solar and consumption data
- Realtime calculation of electricity CO2 Intensity based on level of import from the wider grid on a household and virtual microgrid basis.
- Estimation of marginal rate of CO2 Intensity if a load is switched on.
- UK Wind output forecast
- Selectable UK Grid supply mix: select whether to include nuclear, gas and coal or just gas as the backup source.
- Selectable level of grid wind and hydro - assuming households are on a green tariff with high level of renewable energy in the supply mix.
The software contained in this repository to produce the virtual microgrid dashboard fetches household solar and consumption data from participating user accounts on emoncms.org. It makes a local cached copy in order to provide a faster loading time and browsing experience. Emoncms.org is also open source, the source code can be found here http://github.com/emoncms/emoncms. The UK grid mix data is loaded from the ukgrid tool which needs to be running on the same server, the source code for which can be found here: https://github.com/TrystanLea/ukgrid.
This software is licenced under the Free and Open Source software Gnu Affero General Public Licence.
Contributors: Trystan Lea and Dominic McCann.
Organisations: OpenEnergyMonitor and Carbon Coop