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Hoogkerk, the first "power-matching" city
Hoogkerk officially began operating a microgrid and calling itself "the power-matching city".
Hoogkerk, a suburb or Groningen in the Netherlands, officially began operating a microgrid and calling itself "the power-matching city" an March 10 2010.
The Hoogkerk microgrid includes 25 interconnected houses and is part of the SmartHouse/SmartGrid project and another research project carried out by ECN and further partners. The houses are outfitted as follows:
- Twelve have a combined heat and power (CHP) plants with high efficient 1 kW boilers running on natural gas
- The other 13 have a hybrid heat pump that combines an air-to-water heat pump with condensing boilers
- All 25 houses have smart meters from Itron
- Each house has twelve square meters of PV paneling for a total capacity of 1,400 W peak
- Ten houses have a smart washing machine and dishwasher from Miele
- One house has a plug-in hybrid Toyota Prius car and two others each have an all-electric Volkswagen Golf car
- One house has a standard lead-acid battery to store solar energy for later use
Together, these houses from a virtual power plant. Added community-based power will be produced by a 2 MW wind farm. The community will also have a 30 kW gas micro-turbine manufactured by Capstone.
At the heart of the project is the PowerMatcher software that is developed by ECN in the framework of the SmartHouse/SmartGrid and other research projects. As the microgrid's main intelligence, PowerMatcher will assign a software agent to every component on the system. The agents will then negotiate for the cheapest power, sell generated power at the best price and try to get the maximum benefit from each source of power consumption.
Data will be collected on how much energy participants use and on whether residents are willing to exchange comfort for flexibility based on financial incentives. Residents volunteered to be part of the program, showing a predisposition for flexibility. The special objective of the SmartHouse/SmartGrid field trial will be to analyze the scalability of the PowerMatcher system in order to estimate whether the technology is capable of matching demand and supply from numerous distributed resources in a mass-scale adoption scenario.
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