IEEE Power & Energy Magazine - September/October 2019 - 69

It is clear that the energy system is moving toward a decentralized
intelligent control and coordination mechanism that safeguards
system operations from the bottom up.

september/october 2019

It is clear that the energy system is moving toward a decentralized intelligent control and coordination mechanism
that safeguards system operations from the bottom up. The

P1 Cluster Power

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PowerMatcher Price

The principal idea of the EFR pilot was that the customers
should own their device-specific data and communicate up
the value chain by sharing only steering and coordination
data. Having a layered decomposition, in which only steering and bid information is being communicated without any
further device-specific details, increases the privacy of the
consumers but complicates the forecasting and optimization
activities for the aggregator.
When an aggregator is being considered as a broker, the
quality of the forecasts is jeopardized because of the lack of
data availability. From the aggregator's perspective, a business
case based only on steering and communication data is rather
unattractive. Further discussions with the stakeholders and end
users are needed to understand the balance between privacy,
business cases, and system reliability. This opens the door to
discussions about separating these roles and moving toward
an independent system operator (ISO) model as an electronic
market/platform for the steering and bid communication, combined with the aggregator model (a broker) acting on behalf of
the device and appliance owners for trading purposes.
A hacker penetration test was performed to determine
the security level of the system architecture based on open
standards; it was executed by a white hat hacker with access

Key Insights and the Way Forward

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Privacy and Security

to the local network of a willing participant. The security
expert was not able to penetrate the controlling or neighboring systems in the IT framework. Although the IT platform
itself was securitized, security could not be assured for the
applied devices and appliances in the field, which is reasonable for a pilot study. In a real-world deployment, one should
take into account different security standards, considering
the possibility for tampering with the measuring devices.
Such tampering can be used to disrupt the local pricing of
flexibility by creating a superabundance of flexibility.
Finally, the entire ICT infrastructure is too vulnerable in
certain aspects. Whereas a DSO typically reaches a reliability rate of 99.9%, the achieved reliability levels of the entire
ICT infrastructure were on the order of 85%. Although this
is acceptable and explainable in a pilot situation, technological development is necessary for the fully operational setting. Currently, multiple solutions are technically available
and being addressed in the planning of future developments.

Power Consumption (kW)

CEN/CENELEC. Offering a standard for devices to operate
with different control algorithms, it allows the RMs to specify the full range of flexibility without needing to share any
device-specific details or privacy-sensitive user data, which
aligns with the European GDPR.
DEF-Pi is an IoT platform that runs software components
on powerful centralized servers and ubiquitous home devices.
This combination (also referred to as fog or edge computing)
of using local and remote devices enables significant scalability by not depending on any one central single point of
failure. Although in this pilot, dEF-Pi was tested "only" to a
scale of approximately 100 households running just over 900
software containers, the framework it builds upon, known
as docker swarm, has been shown to scale to several tens of
thousands of similar software components.
Finally, PowerMatcher has been used in several field tests
(with EFR being the latest) and applied in a real-life pilot
with a large number of residents and devices. Because of
PowerMatcher's methodological approach, concentrators
can always be added easily to scale subparts of the power
grid, allowing for scalability.

Time
Power
PowerMatcher Price [Figure 8(b) x-axis]

figure 9. Another view on the data shows the effects of a
price signal on a sunny day, where a price incentive is sent to
make sure the total power production does not exceed 50 kW
(indicated by the red line at −50 kW). On the next day during
the morning (as a test), the price signal is not sent until noon,
showing a significant effect on the power production.
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IEEE Power & Energy Magazine - September/October 2019

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