Projects

Many players in the energy system have to prepare for the changes to be expected in the next years such as high electricity production in summer due to strongly extended PV installation, the occurrence of sudden positive or negative supply peaks and in consequence higher electricity prices, most probably especially in winter time. On the other hand, PV production on own buildings, new technologies for decentral energy storage such as batteries or hydrogen tanks and the sector coupling between electricity production, transportation and domestic heating offers several opportunities to find new business cases and to limit the impact of the challenges mentioned before. By installing PV, storage technologies and re-electrification devices, maybe including integration with the natural gas grid, companies and municipal utilities can make themselves more independent from the energy system and they may gain a new role while changing locally or regionally the energy system.

The project investigates systems that store electric energy to adapt the (volatile) supply to its demand. Such systems, which consume electricity (usually for Power-to-Gas), store and produce energy, are here referred to as “prosumage systems” (producer + consumer + storage).

The overall project consists of four tasks:

1. Definition of concepts for local prosumage systems with volatile energy supply (PV and/or hydropower) and different demand profiles
2. Design/scaling and techno-economic analysis of technology combinations
3. Pilot scale experiments to demonstrate technical feasibility of technology combinations
4. Analysing mutual influence of local prosumage systems and the Swiss energy system

Please contact Tilman Schildhauer and Marcel Hofer for further information.