Tutorial: Create your Energy Management System

THIS PAGE IS WORK IN PROGRESS AND WE WELCOME YOUR FEEDBACK

It describes how you can build your own energy management system. Some features are described with two versions:

NOW: which describes the current implementation and the way it works now.

WISH: the way we foresee it to work. See this as user requirements. And feel to comment on it and share your wishes.

Introduction

OpenRemote can be used as an Energy Management System (EMS), which can schedule energy consuming devices and storage devices, taking into account your renewable energy producers, agile tariffs from your energy provider and required charge schedules for your electric vehicles.

In this electricity example, we are connecting a series of consumers: an energy meter, chargers, a series of vehicles; a series of producers: solar panels and a windturbine; and a static battery. Secondly, we are adding the forecasting services for both consumption and production and connecting the agile supplier tariffs. Finally, the optimisation service will control the setpoint power of the battery, as well as the vehicles. The optimisation will either target the highest financial savings or carbon savings, based on your preference.

Electricity assets and required agents

We assume you have set up the latest version of OpenRemote. If not, check out the Quick Start first.

If you navigate to 'Assets' and add an asset, using the '+' button. You will see a list of asset and agent types. A subset of these asset types are intended to set up your own EMS. They include the relevant attributes and configuration setting such that the optimisation service can recognise and manage them.

We'll be setting up a series of these assets, step-by-step.

Optimisation

The Optimisation asset is actually representing the optimisation service. It will take into account all assets which are added as children of this asset. So first add an Optimisation asset at the root of your asset tree on the left and give it a name. We'll explain later how the optimisation actually works, after adding all the other assets.

Electricity Producer

structure with main attributes: power and power forecast

PV Solar

specific attributes set location

Forecast service

NOW: API credentials for Forecast.Solar need to be set in provisioning code before deploying OpenRemote. Add a config item 'Include in forecast solar service' in 'power' attribute.

WISH: Set up a connection to Forecast.Solar using the Forecast.solar Agent. Next, when the config item 'Include in forecast solar service' is added to the 'power' attribute of a PV Solar asset, the predicted data points will be added to this attribute, using the location of the PV solar asset.

Wind Turbine

specific attributes set location

Forecast service

NOW: OpenWeather Agent to be set up, with rule for windpower forecast.

WISH: Set up a connection to OpenWeather using the OpenWeather Agent. Next, when the config item 'Include in forecast wind service' is added to the 'power' attribute of a Wind turbine asset, the predicted data points will be added to this attribute, using the location of the Wind turbine asset.

Electricity Consumer

main attributes: power and power forecast

Agents

eg.

Forecast

weighted historical moving average

Electricity Battery

main attributes

Agents

eg. simulator

Forecast

simulator

Electricity Charger

main attributes: powerMax, energyImportTotal

Agents

eg. OCPP, Unicorn

Electric Vehicle

main attributes: power and setpoint power

Agents

brands or aggregators (eg. Masternaut)

Energy supplier

Using agile tariffs

Agents

EPEX tariffs

Optimisation

enabling

financial weighting and interval size

carbon and financial saving