NOBEL: Neighbourhood Oriented Brokerage Electricity Monitoring System

The goal of Nobel is to enable a 30% reduction of the currently spent energy by providing a more efficient distributed monitoring and control system for local network operators and prosumers.

Europe and the rest of the world share common goals towards energy efficiency and sustainability. As we witness the last years, the energy sector has started undergoing dramatic changes that will have an eminent effect on businesses and economy. European leaders committed themselves to reduce primary energy consumption by 20% compared to projections for 2020. Energy efficiency is the most cost-effective way of achieving such goal. Furthermore, improving energy efficiency also addresses the key energy challenges of climate change, energy security and competitiveness.

Distributed generation of energy coming from various vendors, even private homes, is a big challenge and, at the same time, a generator of new business opportunities for tomorrow’s power management systems that, unlike today, will not dispatch energy centrally or under central control. On the contrary, the production, distribution and management of energy will be treated and optimized using local data.The NOBEL project will build an energy brokerage system with which individual energy consumers can communicate their energy needs directly with both large-scale and small-scale energy producers, thereby making energy use more efficient. We have set an ambitious goal: based on previous studies, we expect our brokerage system to achieve a 30% reduction in energy consumption. The brokerage system will use a middleware system to communicate relevant data and IPv6 technology to interconnect the middleware with sensors and energy meters on individual devices.

Even today, (parts of) the power system are highly nonlinear with fast changing dynamics. It is hard to predict disturbances and undertake counter measures on time. In existing approaches electricity is distributed to the final users according to its expected estimated demand, usually pre-computed yearly. Such non-dynamic approaches, are difficult to evolve and cannot accommodate changes in the system. By having a cross-layer and open information flow among the different actors involved we can make better and more timely predictions, and inject new dynamics in the system (e.g. locality of energy production, direct interaction of business processes with the energy management systems etc) that will lead to better energy management and achieve higher energy savings.