FED Journal 6: A view on the functioning FED system

The FED-system created a testbed to be used after the project ends. Five companies have already tested their products in the FED-system. This includes advanced control systems for buildings, smart charging of cars, advanced battery control systems, phase shifting material storages, prognosis of the production in the electricity system, heat pumps in co-operation with district heating and cloud services for energy data.

Currently twelve new projects are based on the FED-testbed. Six of these projects are large EU-funded projects that will use the FED results in various ways. It is interesting to see that these projects cater many different EU programs. In the Smart Cities Lighthouse Iris had a record evaluation and also under H2020, are Micro to megagrids, Era-Net Smart Grid Plus & United Grid, as is Flexi-grid. The ACCESS project is financed under the Interreg North Sea region. CELSIUS is a collaboration hub for efficient, integrated heating and cooling solutions supporting cities in their energy transition to carbon-neutral systems. The projects is funded by the Swedish Energy Agency and the EIT Climate-KIC.

Rather than the project being the grand-plan, it fits into the strategy of the Johanneberg / Chalmers campus. Several other projects on smart grids have also started, either in the FED system or in the testbeds HSB Living Lab and Riksbyggen Positive Footprint Housing in Johanneberg. The campus area of Johanneberg together with nearby buildings are planned to be a testbed for local sustainable energy systems for years to come. The objective of the project to help create an urban lab for these questions is fulfilled.

It’s essential to see that the FED solutions were set in a business-to-business situation and the replication opportunities are much in that field too. Moving to consumers’ social acceptance is important, but the threshold is lower in premises and multi-family houses than single-family households due to aspects regarding personal integrity. Furthermore, knowledge about these solutions is low, so education is needed, first at business level. For example, mobile telephone providers often use the same infrastructure providing services to customers, with the customers unaware of the ‘work behind the scenes’.

The license cost of an IoT-platform do seem to be affordable, at least for larger communities. Other conclusions point in the direction of starting with the easy steps and connecting the most beneficial market participants, should one replicate. Decision makers should pay attention to the question: who will be the market operator?

Finally, some of the benefits of FED might be blocked today due to regulation, but the rules can change in the near future. New possibilities to trade with flexibility can occur.

FED has been a collaborative project and the product is also about collaboration, between local grids and overlying markets, all types of local production and storages, heating, cooling and electricity, small scale and large scale, house owners and energy companies. Collaboration is needed to phase out fossil fuels.

The main lesson from the FED exercise is that it can in fact be done. A fossil free energy district could be built! A multi-commodity-grid can indeed be built, function and contribute to goals in the area of energy efficiency, use of different renewable energy sources and trading to specific agents’ demands. In the demonstrative setting, the technical KPIs were met. It’s too early though, to expect a smooth transition into society. There are social barriers and legislative ones but it is also important to see the economic restrictions to a smooth transition to FED-like usage of infrastructures. The following picture shows an indication of the plusses and minuses of any FED-like system compared to conventional (and existing) one. Somehow society will have to find a way to accommodate the winners and losers in this.

At the end of the project, the FED has published the following policy recommendations:

1. Strive for social acceptance
2. Direct investments and incentives
3. Define the role of the municipality
4. Enable trading with flexibility
5. Enable testing, demos and proof of concepts

These have been discussed in earlier journals but it is interesting to see what kind of initial barriers have been identified for replication in the Netherlands, a country that from a distance, may seem rather comparable to Sweden.

The conclusion is that, like the Swedish, the general Dutch neighbourhood is not ready for the FED system. Proof of concept is still a possibility though. To get a proof of concept up and running the FED project needs to address the following:

• Adaption of FED system input values to Dutch standards and context

• Connectivity issues

• Ensure that hourly metering is available and legal

• Communication materials to bridge any and all cognitive gaps, increasing transparency and decreasing complexity

• Finding a suitable location, possible a cluster region

• Define and clarify responsibilities and roles: owner, client, operator and so on

• Define and clarify a business model

Helped by the contact of the UIA Expert, the FED project has been introduced at the campus of the Technical University in Delft. This supplies access to the Dutch academic world, some other intriguing similarities like exemption from the electricity law, and possibly more knowledge sharing in the future as the University is ready to develop a geothermal heat source its own.

Location and operation

I think it is good to realize that projects go through phases and I guess it is hard to argue that the inception is an important one. The FED project was among the first tranche of UIA projects that started back at the end of 2016, which meant that the actual inception and writing took place in 2015 and conceptually even earlier. If we look at predecessors of the FED we may think of the Horizon 2020 project named Celsius, which became famous for supplying district heating to a ship. This is relevant because it shows that the creativity around heat and heat networks in Gothenburg shown in the FED project, was not a special, once in a lifetime, situation. The area is very suited for projects like this one. It was not the first project, and it will not be the last, since creativity and the right partners will bring new inception.

In my third journal on the FED project I concluded that it is embedding in the Johanneberg Science Park innovation system with its cornerstones of (1) Interconnecting and networking between participants, (2) emphasis on creating and sharing of knowledge and technology, (3) diversity in financial sources and (4) boosts for business climate, was an extremely important asset. Most of the challenges identified by the UIA for their projects would find their way along the soft/networked infrastructure supplied by the science park. And such has been the case for the last 4 years.

So, if we consider the city Gothenburg and its partners a good place for projects and their creative inception and if we consider Johanneberg Science Park an advanced innovation park where multi-stakeholder projects can be managed and operationalized, then it makes perfect sense for the EU to invest in demonstration projects like these.

Smart grids

The societal perspective on European demonstration projects rooted in the EU’s Lisbon strategy to become the most competitive economy in the world can be seen from the point of a singular project and analysis of its contribution to the mission or theoretically, into an alternative use of the budgets involved.

We can be short on the singular project evaluation. As a proof of concept, the FED project has been simply outstanding.

Unfortunately, it is common knowledge that the implementation of smart grids in Europe is slow. The reasons for this are manifold. The need for smart consumers was tackled in the FED project via the building in which they work and the engaging of businesses that run the building at the campus. The often cited lack of stakeholder engagement, in particular the lack of two-way communication was not the case in the FED project itself due to the business to business character. The attitude of end-users to energy was also not part of the project.

FED did facilitate that all stakeholders could gain, or at least participate on their terms. With regards to funding & incentives all stakeholders had strong business reasons to participate be it for energy efficiency, academic, environmental, or technological innovation reasons. The open market, often a barrier to the implementation of smart grids, was specifically arranged at the (energy law exempted) campus and part of the project, though not easily repeated in non-similar surroundings. There are no clear standards for smart grids yet. The FED itself was more angled at showing the world that something could be done, then on the design of legal standards.

 As the dedicated UIA expert, I have been asked to be the ‘critical friend’ of the project and this has been an interesting and sometimes challenging position. Interesting because the complexities and the ambitions of the project from the academic analysis to the implementation in the boiler room and usage of the digital market place were over such a wide spectrum. Challenging because the dissemination output of the project was already at a high level and it was sometimes difficult to shine a new light on project-parts among the already existing videos, articles and conferences.

Among the legacy may be the particular topic of replicability. The FED suggested to policymakers: strive for social acceptance, direct investments and incentives, define the role of the municipality, enable trading with flexibility, enable testing, demos and proof of concepts. I think, however that these recommendations are still very abstract in their formulations and although policymaker will like that, they will not be remembered as the legacy of the project.

The technology aspects of the project will certainly be remembered and the wise use of different types of batteries, as well as their technical optimization will no doubt be further developed at the campus and elsewhere in the world. This is the global development of innovation and technology that is happening at the beginning of the 21 century. 

However, in real life, the individual people that work on projects like these, they find each other in projects like the FED. This starts when they find each other at breakfast conferences in Gothenburg, or EU-conferences in Brussels for that matter. Or at lectures in Delft. And they meet people that are similar to them. And they talk about their projects. And they read about them, or watch videos. And every once in a while there’s a spark, or window of opportunity, and the people that meet manage to formulate a project. A project that can be an incremental innovation. Or like the FED, a project that is a little bit larger, and innovates at system level, because it develops and combines innovations.

I would argue that the legacy of the project is simply its systemic character. Basically, the legacy of the project is that a bunch of dedicated people across different organisations -which share a passion for technology and sustainability- built something completely new based on their latest insights. This is the important legacy of the project. It is one of the first truly systemic innovation projects in the field of grids and smart-grids and that’s why it will not be replicated at the speed of the iPhone. It’s systemic, not a product.

Now a lot of the interest in the project I have, is in the people that worked on it. It is not without reason that most journals ended with interviews and so did the video I reported. I am extremely interested in the people that manage to go beyond incremental improvement. Jealous perhaps.