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Active projects and challenges as of 02.04.2025 05:55.


01: Assessing flexibility potential based on real-world e-mobility data

Discovering the flexibility / peak shaving potential in residential EV charging.


~ PITCH ~

Residential e-mobility charging is expected to support the energy transition for increasing the share of renewable energy. However, the potential is often estimated based only on simulations and without any real-world data. In this challenge, you can assess the flexibility potential with unidirectional and bidirectional charging of residential e-mobility charging based on real-world data. For this purpose, we bring lots of real-world load- and charging data from over 500 charging stations and cars. What is the flexibility potential of this fleet of chargers and cars? How could this flexibility be utilized and how big are potential monetary benefits? How can flexibility and monetary benefits be increased by bidirectional charging compared to only unidirectional charging?

EKZ: Ludger Leenders, Bendikt Hilpisch


03: Beyond Labels

Uncovering Flexibility Potential in Energy Consumption Data


~ PITCH ~

Energy suppliers will be faced with an increasingly complex production and consumption landscape. In order to anticipate these complex changes new methods for categorizing customers or novel services are needed. This challenge focuses on new methodologies to detect the flexibility potential of prosumers. As novel smart-home devices will allow automatic control of high-power consumption devices like EV-charging, electric heating (heat pumps), tumble dryers in private households or even complex machinery in industrial facilities – flexibility is driven by energy efficiency or financial incentives via dynamic tariffs. One key aspect will be the maximal load of a household or an industrial facility on the local grid. Flexible tariffs are designed to reduce peak loads and will be a financial incentive for scheduling consumption and production. This challenge aims to identify unknown devices as flexibility potential in unlabeled consumption data – paving the way for smart tariffs and novel services in the portfolio of a modern energy supplier.

Challenge Owner: Primeo Energie AG


04: Catching up with photovoltaic expansion

Published pv installed capacity underestimates pv production. We want to estimate pv installed capacity considering pv growth patterns


~ PITCH ~

Pronovo is the entity that provides a very good overview of installed pv systems in Switzerland and many market players use the Pronovo database to estimate PV production. Unfortunately, there are major delays between the installation of the pv systems and the recording in the Pronovo database. This wasn't a bigger issue so far, but the swiss pv market is growing rapidly and so the lag is causing a general underestimation of pv power production.

With additional information on the pv systems such as installation date, audit date, date of entry into the database, we would like to identify patterns, trends and seasonalities in order to be able to better and continuously estimate the current status of the pv expansion.

Pitch: 📎 BFE_challenge.pdf


05: Building Energy Insights - Empowering Building Owners

Create a user-friendly tool to offer building owners personalised insights for early and informed energy planning decisions


~ PITCH ~

Create a user-friendly tool to offer building owners personalised insights for early and informed energy planning decisions.

Open Data sources with APIs have been identified, as well as possible User Outputs and Web Design (Prototypes).

  • Define the Information that should be displayed to the users according to the available raw data
  • Define the logic necessary to go from the raw Open Data to the result information that will be displayed to the users
  • Prepare the data according to the defined logic to be used as a source table for the tool landing page
  • Web Design: analyse the already available prototypes and define how the user interface should look like for a user-friendly use of the platform
  • Customer Journey Design: this landing page provides information to the users about their building. It is the first step of the process. Define the Customer Journey the users should be guided through in order to go from the first expression of interest to making them actual clients
  • Web Development: Develop the Webapp. Available Tool: ArcGIS Enterprise Experience Builder (no-Code Tool). Available start code in Python, HTML, CSS. Any other Tool or Language however also possible.

Context The city of St.Gallen and the OST Fachhochschule have been working together in an Innosuisse project, that found out that a lot of building owners are overwhelmed with energy issues. There are usually not well informed and only act when they have to, for example when the heating system is breaking down. Without planning ahead, the replacing technology will often be a fossil heating system (unless a local legal prohibition has already come into force). To avoid this, we want to provide building owners with personalized information about their building.

Challenge Miro Board with Data, APIs and Design Prototypes: miro.com

Repo: https://gitlab.com/ssgw/

Live Plattform: https://energyhackday.mobiparking.ch/

Challenge Owner: SGSW Clara Esteve, Ramon Schmid, Eren Baglar

EDH 2023.png

2023091516 Energy Data Hackdays  Building Energy Insights  Vorgehen 1.jpg


07: Spatial Clustering for district energy


~ PITCH ~

A big problem especially for local governments today is identifying regions of cities where district heating could be applied. In the past they used simple methods based on building densities and sizes. Machine learning can be used to improve on this.

Thanks to our models we know a lot about cities and districts. We are looking for novel ways to use machine learning clustering methods to generate clusters of buildings that are close together and share important characteristics for connecting to district heating.

Challenge Owner: Planeto Energy/University Geneva Jonathan Chambers, Stefano Cozza


09: Identifying static yaw misalignment of wind turbines


~ PITCH ~

When a wind turbine and the incoming wind are not perfectly aligned one speaks of yaw misalignment. This causes a reduction in power production and unwanted mechanical stresses on various turbine components.

In this case the turbine controller kicks in, checks the yaw misalignment, also called yaw error, and aligns the turbine with the wind in order to bring the yaw error back to zero.

However, a turbine might still be misalignment with the wind, even though the monitored yaw error is zero. Potential reasons for this include malfunctioning sensors, issues with software, improper installation and others. Having such a constant misalignment is called static yaw misalignment.

The goal of this challenge is to identify static yaw misalignment and mitigate its effects on the turbine. For the challenge two open source datasets of two wind farms will be available

Challenge Owner: OST Florian Hammer


10: Day-ahead active losses forecasting


~ PITCH ~

This challenge is about forecasting the transmission losses on the Swiss transmission grid. More specifically, you will be asked to forecast the losses for the next day in hourly resolution. As the transmission system operator in Switzerland, Swissgrid is responsible to procure energy to compensate losses on the transmission grid. Part of the procurement is done one day before the real present time. Based on the day-ahead forecast, we can know how much to procure. More accurate forecasting will help improve the procurement performance and therefore lower transmission system costs.

In this challenge, you’ll practice your machine learning skills in a well-prepared VM data science environment with cleaned training datasets from the energy industry. You will have access to GPU for your machine learning models so you can focus on modelling!

This is a great chance to explore different models and to improve your skills in forecasting.

Context: The active losses on the transmission grid can be influenced by many factors, such as the historical active losses, renewable generation, cross border flows between Switzerland and the neighboring countries, weather, etc. The raw data will be provided as time series data between 2019 and 2021, in hourly resolution.

The following datasets are provided for you to include in the model:

Historical active losses data Solar generation data for Germany and Italy Wind generation data for Germany and Italy Temperature data for Switzerland, Germany, Italy, France Net Transfer Capacity (NTC) between Swissgrid and the neighboring TSOs (NTC is the maximum exchange programme between two areas which is consistent with the security standards of both areas)

Outcome: The well-performed models will be introduced to our internal forecasting process and support us make better decisions in our market operational tasks, and will eventually help us improvement procurement performance and reduce procurement costs. This is your chance to make a real impact!

We also have various experts from different parts of Swissgrid here so its also a chance to get to know us as an employeer.

Challenge Owner: Swissgrid Liu Xiying, Tim Breitenbach, Giulio Ferraris


12: Predicting Voltages in Substations

Prediction of Voltages in Substations for Grid Stabilisation


~ PITCH ~

For grid stabilization, operators of different voltage levels have target voltage schedules. These support grid stabilization. It is possible to influence the voltage in a substation with shunt reactors via reactive power compensation. Turning these shunt reactors on or off causes transients, which in turn cause wear and tear on the components of the substation and the shunt reactor. This means a grid operator wants to minimize the number of on/off switches of the shunt reactor while still using it to keep the voltage in the substation as close as possible to the target voltage published by the higher voltage level grid operator. We have time series measurements and target voltages for several of our substations with shunt reactors and aim to train a model that can tell us when to turn the shunt reactors on or off.

Challenge Owner: Axpo Grid AG

  • Nicolas Pelzmann
  • Tobias Schmocker
  • Sandro Renggli
~ README ~

edh2023

Thanks for choosing Axpo's challenge, Predicting Voltages in Substations, for the Energy Data Hackdays 2023. We're glad you're here!

Getting Started

This README will guide you through the process of setting up your environment and working on the challenge. By the end of this guide, you'll be ready to dive into the provided datasets, create your predictive model, and help us improve grid stabilization.

Prerequisites

Before you begin, please ensure you have the following prerequisites:

  1. Access to the VM with Jupyter Hub: We've provided a virtual machine with Jupyter Hub installed. This will serve as your development environment. Just go to our Jupyter Hub and sign in with a username (no special characters or spaces) and password of your choosing - just don't forget it.

You can also develop on your local machine if you prefer. Talk to us about getting the dataset onto your local machine.

Setting Up Your Environment

Follow these steps to set up your environment and start working on the challenge:

  1. Access Jupyter Hub: Open your web browser and navigate to the provided URL for Jupyter Hub. Log in using your credentials.

  2. Clone the Git Repository: Open a terminal and clone this repo

git clone https://github.com/axpogroup/edh2023.git
cd edh2023
  1. Accessing Datasets: The training and validation datasets for both substations are located in the /data directory on the Jupyter Hub VM. You can copy them to the data directory with
cp /home/data/data.zip ~/edh2023/data.zip
unzip data.zip
  1. Installing Dependencies: Create a virtual environment to install dependencies:
python -m venv .venv

Activate the virtual environment

source .venv/bin/activate

To ensure your environment has the necessary packages, run the following command:

pip install -r requirements.txt

Register the virtual environment as ipykernel:

python -m ipykernel install --user --name=edh_venv

It will take a few seconds for the new environment to show up as an available. You can open the sample_notebook.ipynb and select the environment as kernel once it is and get going with digging into the details.

Understanding the Challenge

Before you start coding, it's important to grasp the problem at hand:

  • You are provided with time series of substation measurements, energy production, weather data, and target voltages for two substations with shunt reactors.

  • The goal is to create a model that can predict voltages in the substation such that, based on these predictions, one can decide when to turn the shunt reactors on or off to keep the measured voltage close to the target voltage. You should keep the average number of on-off/off-on switches below 2/day to limit wear and tear on system components. One of the main challenges herein is

Your Task

Your main task is to develop a predictive model that predicts the voltage in each substation and that can effectively recommend when to activate or deactivate shunt reactors in order to stabilize the grid voltages. Use the provided datasets to train and validate your model. They contain weather, electricity production, and grid measurement data. Take a look at the sample_notebook.ipynb to get started with analyzing the data.

Feel free to explore different machine learning algorithms, techniques, and preprocessing methods. Don't hesitate to innovate and experiment!

Evaluation

You can evaluate your model with either the root mean square error for the voltage prediction or utils.eval.alternative_strategy_reward. Both of these are relevant metrics for us.

Need Help?

If you encounter any issues during the challenge or have questions about the provided datasets, feel free to ask one of us for help.

Happy coding!


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