EcoGrid EU — A prototype for European Smart Grids

The EcoGrid EU is a large-scale demonstration on the Danish island Bornholm. The aim is to demonstrate a Smart Grids solution to operate a power system with more than 50 % renewable energy, including a mix of variable distributed energy resources (i.e. wind, solar, biomass, biogas, and CHP) and energy storage technologies such as heat pumps, district heating and batteries from EVs. Out of the 28 000 electricity customers on Bornholm, 2000 residential consumers will participate with flexible demand. A major part of the participants will be equipped with residential demand response devices with intelligent controllers, enabling customers to respond to real-time prices and allow users to pre-program their automatic demand-response preferences. This paper presents the concept of a real-time market and information architecture, which gives numerous small end-users and local producers of distributed energy new options for offering TSO additional balancing and ancillary services.