Scientists in Schools Program - Presentations from the Energy and Climate Change Symposium

1. Intelligent Energy Management
Bringing Brains to the Brawn.. (!)
Energy Transformed Flagship
Glenn Platt
Group Leader, CSIRO Energy Technology

2. How The Market Has Changed

3. Distributed Energy
• Clean, efficient, small electricity generation
technology- small solar systems, gas generators,
etc.
• Much more intelligent control in how we use energy-
demand side management & other “new” areas are
part of DE
• Of significant policy interest
• Of significant research interest
• Of significant commercial interest

4. Distributed Energy???

5. Management and Control Systems
• How do we coordinate all these individuals into
doing something useful?
• How can we minimise greenhouse gas emissions?
• How can we improve existing infrastructure?
• How do we make these things cheap?
• How do we deal with dynamic and changing
situations?
• How can we keep the customer happy?
• How can we provide a “firmness” of response?
• Electrical engineers, computer scientists, software
engineers, mathematicians

6. Heating, Ventilation Air-Conditioning
• HVAC is a very significant consumer of energy in
Australia
• HVAC also causes a lot of peak-load problems
• How can we minimise the energy consumed? How
can we smooth out the peaks?
• Pre-cool the building
• Coordinate with local generation
• We need to learn a model

7. HVAC agent

8. The Coordination of Multiple Devices
• We need to coordinate all these loads and
generators
• Importantly, traditional control systems are not
appropriate here- scalability and depth of control
• We’ve chosen to apply techniques from the
discipline of multi-agent systems science to our
problem.
• Agents are simple, yet can achieve
complex outcomes

9. The Coordination of Multiple Devices
Emergent behaviour- when large numbers of
programs interact in a connected environment,
various phenomena occur which are not explicable
in terms of the programming or behaviour of any
single agent.

10. The Coordination of Multiple Devices
Movie!

11. Agents in a Residential Setting

12. The Virtual Power Station
• At the moment, the economics of installing your
own solar system are fairly poor:
• Low payback rate
• Limited usefulness to the wider network
• If we can aggregate lots of small solar systems in to
one big coordinated response, this would have a
much greater use
• The “Virtual Power Station”
• Can significantly improve the payback for the
individual
• Need to be able to provide predictions
• Machine learning again!

13. Utility Simulation

14. Utility Simulation

15. Conclusions
• One of the biggest opportunities we have is to
simply be more intelligent in how we utilise our
existing systems
• Technology from artificial intelligence, electrical and
software engineering, can assist the incumbent
practitioners here
“Its called demand management, and if your kid is
looking for a job with a future, they should enrol in a
course soon.”
-Australian Financial Review, 23 Oct 2004
• Importantly, these are not “energy” practitioners!

16. CSIRO Energy Technology
Glenn Platt
Demand Side Energy Systems
Phone: +61 2 49606120
Email: glenn.platt@csiro.au
Web: www.csiro.au/science/smartagents.html
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