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Electric vehicles (EVs) and the recent pandemic outbreak give cities a new trend to primarily private and shared mobility with low noise and less air pollution. Crucial factors for the widespread of EVs are the electrical charging infrastructure, driving range, and the reduction of the cost of battery packets. For this reason, there is a massive effort from manufacturers, governments, and the scientific community to reduce battery costs and boost sustainable electrical production and distribution. Battery reuse is an alternative to reduce batteries’ costs and environmental impacts. Second-life batteries can be used in a wide variety of secondary applications. Second-life batteries can be connected with off-grid or on-grid photovoltaic and wind systems, vehicle charging stations, forklifts, and frequency control. The present work aims to analyze the main challenges imposed on the reuse of batteries, the leading technologies for their reuse, and the different types of batteries in terms of their feasibility for second-life use. The main novelty of this work is the discussion about the barriers, opportunities, uncertainties, and technologies for the second life market. Here we summarize the present state of the art in reusing lithium-ion batteries discussing technical and economic feasibility, environmental impacts, and perspectives. The results show five business models that have been proposed in the literature, three types of markets for trading second-life batteries, and the main opportunities and barriers for each actor in the battery supply chain.

Among different solutions to increase flexibility of electricity system, grid interactive water heaters (GIWHs) can make a large contribution, against a relatively low cost. They can advantageously be used within a single building, a local energy community or within an entire distribution grid, thanks to the very fast response time, low cost, highly distributed resource and widely demonstrated technology. In the near future, the flexibility potential of GIWHs will certainly increase, thanks to the advantageous flexibility programs that have been implementing in some area of the world, with the aim of coordinating several million of GIWHs with the electricity network. In this study, we assess the potential value that the flexibility of GIWHs can bring to the electrical power system, compared to the other sources of flexibility, focusing on the US market, specifically California, Oregon and Washington. The GIWH technology and the main GIWH control strategies are described, highlighting the flexibility behaviour of GIWHs. An overview of the GIWH pilot programs currently developed in the US market is provided, and current available technologies are shown, both for new and for retrofit GIWH installations. Most of the papers discussed in the literature focus on different aspects of demand response (DR), but very few of them focus specifically on GIWHs, and none of them offers a review of GIWHs in the US context. The present work thus constitutes a research gap, and could help stakeholders to assess the US GIWH market evolution, identifying the potential value of GIWH flexibility.

Microgrid systems that combine cooling, heating and power (CHP) with distributed cogeneration units and renewable energy sources are a practical way to meet the growing need for energy, and industrial parks have enormous potential for the development of integrated electrical and thermal systems. This paper presents a microgrid CHP model and evaluates the possibility of developing the model in the Dong Nam industrial park in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. HOMER software was used to evaluate the effectiveness of the model.

The Blorin project started at the end of 2019 to support the implementation of a blockchain platform to support the energy services provision from end users by means of Demand Response and Vehicle to Grid programs. The experimental part of the project is being carried out on two Mediterranean islands and inside the University campus in Palermo. Customized smart contracts have been designed to support the active participation of end users to regulation services for the two weak electrical grids of the islands in the view of a deep penetration of renewable energy in the two energy systems. In particular, the smart contract for remuneration accounts for the very special energy situation of islands where TSO, DSO, energy seller and aggregator collapse in a unique market actor. Moreover, in islands the electricity provision is typically still relying on diesel generators thus strongly connecting the Demand Response programs benefit to the reduction of fuel consumption, as an effect of increased efficiency of diesel generators. Due to the critical international situation and to the climate crisis, fossil fuels get more and more costly, thus a speed up of the energy transition in small islands is highly needed. This paper addresses the problem of designing a customized smart contract for remuneration of Demand Response service provision in small islands.

Transportation is one of the key sectors causing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and air pollution. With the substantial increase in passenger and freight transportation, the corresponding GHG emissions and air pollutants are expected to increase significantly. Recent global and national policies are targeting at reducing environmental impacts of transportation activities. The promotion of public transportation and development of electric buses (e-buses) will reduce the use of fossil fuels in transportation, and consequently, reduce GHG emissions. This study assesses the life cycle GHG emissions and other environmental impacts of e-bus, and compares them with those of conventional bus operated in Vietnam. The results indicate that e-bus is a preferred choice in most of studied environmental impact categories over the whole life cycle such as GHG emission, ozone depletion, ozone formation, fine particulate matter formation, acidification, etc. For GHG emissions, the adoption of electric mobility will reduce 42.62 gCO(2)eq per passenger km of carbon footprint if conventional buses are substituted by e-buses in Vietnam.

This chapter presents the outcomes of the experimental implementation of the architecture described in Chap. 4 running a hardware testbed for the emulation of domestic electrical load profiles. Besides it shows how this experimental scenario integrates both with the legacy metering architecture and with the blockchain platform. Finally, the integrated use with an Energy Management System designed on purpose is also described with the aim of ensuring intervention and automating the end user’s response to a DR event.

Sicily is one of the first Italian regions for installed power from renewable energy plants, especially photovoltaic and wind plants, and a crucial point for the Mediterranean energy hub. Its role as nexus between the European and the African Continents is becoming more and more significant due to the realization in a short time of the so called Tyrrhenian link and the High Voltage Direct Current (HVDC) connection with Tunisia. In this framework, the paper presents a model of the Sicily power generation and transmission system, including the Tyrrhenian link and two equivalent buses representing the Sardinian power network and the rest of the Continental Europe (CE) synchronous area, for both steady-state and dynamic analysis. The model is developed in Neplan and it is based on the actual structure of the Sicilian power system. The rest of the CE system is represented in the model and validated by a comparison with the large-scale dynamic model of the CE provided by the European Network of Transmission System Operators for Electricity (ENTSO-E). Finally, some simulations of the Sicilian grid in future energy scenarios are presented, and the behaviour of the system is discussed considering different transient conditions.

Le prestazioni energetiche degli edifici dipendono non solo dall’aspetto termico ma anche da fattori elettrici come: • La presenza di generatori di energia elettrica o termica da Fonti di Energia Rinnovabile (FER) e sistemi di cogenerazione (CHP); • La presenza di sistemi di controllo automatico dell’edificio (BACS) e sistemi di gestione tecnica dell’edificio (TBM). Per promuovere l’efficientamento energetico degli edifici, gli Stati membri dell’Unione Europea hanno seguito diverse strade. In particolare, negli ultimi decenni diverse politiche di incentivazione hanno attuato finanziamenti locali di generatori da FER.

In this chapter, the problem of energy management in smart grids is outlined. Optimized energy management is considered here as the operation of energy and power flow control in the aim of attaining minimum cost or minimum power losses while meeting technical constraints. Of course, according to the type of energy system in which such operation is carried out, the meaningful variables and objectives in the problem may largely change. As the extension of the system increases, the influence of the physical behaviour of the electrical power lines takes a more important role. Power electronics takes instead an increasing influence, as the dimension of the power system decreases although Kirchhoff's laws must always be verified. Energy management is also an interesting issue in multi-carrier energy hubs that implement a recent tendency in energy systems interfacing smart grids. They include different energy resources that need to be managed differently, but in an integrated fashion. This chapter offers an overview of energy management in a small system using a two-level centralized approach.

This paper provides a multi-objective optimization framework aimed at the management of a multi-carrier energy system involving both electricity and hydrogen. Using the concept of the multi-carrier hub, the proposed system has been modelled in order to define completely every energy flow inside the plant. After that, a heuristic multi-objective optimization algorithm, the Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm II, has been implemented for the energy management of the plant, taking into account simultaneously three different objective functions related to economic and technical goals. This optimization process provides the set point defining the working configuration of the plant for a daylong time horizon. The communication framework between the energy management system, the real plant and the monitoring tool has been developed too, using the Open Platform Communications (OPC) protocol for the data exchange. This has been presented along with the Decision Support System (DSS) provided by the optimizer and the Human Machine Interface (HMI) of the Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) monitoring the plant. All the presented applications are going to be deployed on a real plant demonstrator.

The INGRID FP7 European co-funded project studies several methodologies concerning hydrogen production and storage, aiming to provide services to electricity system operators for suitably balancing electrical supply and demand. In such a context, the problem of integrating different carriers into a single multi-hub optimiser represents a challenging topic for the research. This paper depicts the Energy Management System (EMS) of the plant which will be developed and built as a prototype of the INGRID system. The approach followed for the EMS design and development takes the cue from the matrix model presented in the rest of the paper, as well as the general optimisation problem formulation and the algorithm selected for its solution.

In this paper the problem of optimal reconfiguration for weakly meshed systems is dealt with; meshes are created by the presence of Favoured Customers (FC) requiring supply through two different paths in order to guarantee the maximum service continuity. Aim of the reconfiguration is to attain a network that operates with minimum power losses, and in order to account for particular needs of the FC loads, that shows the minimum overall yearly fault rate on the branches where the power required by the loads flows. Moreover the constraints concerning the bus voltage profiles, the current in branches and the power balance among HV/MV transformers supplying the network must be full-filled. Due to the intrinsic nature of the problem, for its solution a Genetic Algorithm has been adopted creating some perturbation operators that, differently from existing and well-known perturbation operators, allows to widely explore the search space still keeping the feasibility of solutions.