Power flexibility in a property : Independent Project in Electrical Engineering

Sammanfattning

Sweden has since a few years back suffered from a bottleneck in the power transmission lines stemming from a lack of “space” on the grid that transports the power that is generated in the northern parts to the middle and southern parts of the country. A long-term solution would be to increase the grid's capacity by building more transmission lines, however in the meantime, a short-term solution would be to increase our power flexibility. Meaning that the energy consumption gets moved from hours of high demand to hours with low demand and by shutting off equipment. This is called power flexibility and has been researched more in recent times in projects like this. This project will mainly focus on demand-side flexibility which is about how the consumers use their electrical power. In collaboration with Uppsala Arenor och Fastigheter, power usage in one of the company’s properties will be made more flexible. This is achieved by mapping how much power each part of the property utilizes and estimating how much power the electrical equipment in that area consumes. Then determining if that piece of equipment can be either rescheduled to avoid hours of high-powerdemand in Uppsala or turned off without causing major consequences to the property. From this it will be decided if it can be added as a flexibility resource and after that the total power flexibility of the facility will be tallied. Lastly, suggestions on how to implement the power flexibility resources and recommendations for further improvements in future projects will be made. The results of the project were that the selected property Studenternas had an average power usage of 185kW during the day and of that 38% could be utilized as a power flexibility resource. The total power flexibility was therefore 71.2 kW which comes from the laundry rooms and the arena lighting while the other places in the facility contributed with a neglectable amount.