Canadian PI: Dr. Kankar Bhattacharya
Canadian Institution: University of Waterloo
Indian PI: Dr. Rohit Bhakar
Indian Institution: Malaviya National Institute of Technology Jaipur
Project Summary:
The proposed project would address the challenges of integration of distributed energy resources (DERs) in distribution networks and the need for their effective management and utilization necessitated to develop smart grids. The electricity supply shortage and reliability risks in the next four to eight years and trying to meet net-zero objectives is an significant task. Also, the electrification of buildings, transport and industry sectors that will be needed to achieve goals of net-zero emissions by 2050 that has been set by the Canadian federal government will see the province’s electricity demand increase by leaps and bounds. Due to the inherent uncertainty and variability from DERs, the evolving form of grid poses challenges for every component of the power supply chain, such as system operators, market operators, energy suppliers, prosumers, and consumers. An active market place at the distribution level can help to locally manage the decentralised energy generation and its trading among the prosumers and consumers, so that minimal variability is transferred to the upper-level supply chain. The Transactive Energy Market (TEM) concept enables resource management and control, while offering a competitive platform for energy trade to prosumers or aggregators. At one hand, it would provide the Canada team the exposure and insight of load model challenges according to Indian geographical, climatic and cultural scenarios, and to foresee the load upcoming issues arising due to solar rooftop integration, and help them to examine and analyse the role of demand side flexibility to offset these challenges. On the other hand, it would provide a platform to the Indian team to understand the developing technologies and the evaluation models adopted in Canada. The project will give both the teams a great opportunity to collaborate on policy mechanism development in the two countries.
This project will benefit the Canadian electricity market regarding the maximization of the renewable energy portfolio and the deployment of microgrid/smart-grid applications for the Canadian remote Indigenous communities. TEM has the potential to offer new models for trading energy locally for both urban and rural communities in Canada. The use of “Home Energy Management System” to shift the controllable loads/ appliances to off peak time through optimal scheduling algorithms for IoT devices to achieve Demand Response (DR) will be a unique research component of this project.
