Demand Side Management Monitoring – Customer Field Trials with SSE & Strathclyde University

Case Study  Home aspects of the SSE Shetland Nines project

Client profile

SSE Future Networks: NINES is a £45 million project run by Scottish and Southern Energy Power Distribution to develop and manage Shetland’s electricity grid more effectively – and help meet Shetland sustainability ambitions for the future.

The scheme will integrate energy storage, demand-side management, renewable generators and other controllable resources to reduce reliance on the diesel fuelled power station and increase the penetration of renewable generation.

Project Overview

The Nines project aims to have controllable domestic space and water heating to a roll out of 1,000 homes. Besides the technology to care for the demand side management, it also brings some other challenges, like the impact on the home owners energy bills and comfort levels. To add to this, the number of different types of houses varies wildly so there’s no one size fits all when it comes to heating technology.

SSE is working together with Strathclyde University to provide results on the impact of these, to mention just a few:

How efficient are hot water tanks and how much of that energy is really used by the home ownersWhat is the impact of different program “settings” for the new heating system when using controlled demandWhat is the home owner behaviour when it comes to heating and how does this fit with the Active Network Management system [ANM] as this is going to vary as well with time season and weather conditions

Solution

SSE contacted Logic Energy with requirements to remotely monitoring customer heating and energy behaviour for the project and at the same time measure different sensors installed around the new heating system to monitor their usage and efficiency.

One of the initial concerns from SSE Future Networks was the communications, as Shetland is not well known for high coverage in GSM and using standard data loggers was also not ideal, since these would require frequent visits to the home owner and the risk of loosing data by failing to collect it on time. After a desktop study and in cooperation with SSE, Strathclyde University and Logic Energy, a plan of action was put in place to use LeNETmobile GPRS remote data loggers, which are idea for very remote locations due to their persistent connectivity approach. Live recovery of data for this project was essential.

Some of the aspects measured in this project are:

Wireless temperature monitoring through out the houses and in different areasHeating storage water temperature, inlet and outletGeneral usage of heating and water

Benefits

Strathclyde University, who is continuously collecting data from the remote units in Shetland, has direct Live access to the field trial information without the need to rely on home visits, or even calling the loggers to retrieve big “chunks” of data at a time.

Since the monitoring project for Nines involves several tens of houses, Logic Energy’s web management portal is ideal to keep all data archived and in control, as there’s a lot of data coming in all the time. Best of all, this information can be continuously compared and monitored with other sites for any discrepancies and general occupancy behaviour.

All the data, all classified archived, all under control.