emPower

Community energy market

emPower is our concept for community based energy trading in order to optimize the utilization of renewable energy. Our concept groups households into communities, which trade locally produced electricity (in most cases by PV). The price for the energy is determined based on current supply and demand in the community. Utilizing AI technologies, we create a energy-price forecast, which motivates consumers to shift their energy consumption to low price periods.

Energy-aware devices

Energy-aware devices are connected to the emPower ecosystem and use the price forecast to autonomously select the best time-period for charging and operation. Examples are the washing machine that needs to be finished in the evening, the Electric vehicle that needs to be charged by morning and buffered heating systems.

The emPower is based on smart power meters, building on and secured by the cisco infrastructure, as well as Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning to train the AI.

What are the effects on the energy grid?

One of the biggest challenges in the power grid is the high energy fluctuation for renewable energy sources. Currently, surplus energy production of renewables destabilizes the energy market, sometimes even leading to negative prices and the heavy use of fossil energy.

Our concept solves this problem using load peak shifting, meaning that the load is synchronized to energy availability based on market pricing.

(Explanation: By giving the customer a financial benefit of using energy in high production periods, the surplus of the production can be minimized. In return the demand will also be smaller during low production periods, since the prize is higher and the devices are optimized for low cost operation.)

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very proud to have developed a true win-win-win mechanism for the energy supplier, the end consumer and small scale producers.

(Explanation: The energy supplier gets the benefit of a overall more stable grid with more predictable and balanced load, minimizing the need for inefficient long distance energy transmission. The consumer can save money by using locally produced energy with good timing. The small scale energy producers (like households with installed PV capacities) profit from a higher margin when selling their energy inside of the community compared to selling it back to the energy supplier.)

Thank you!