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Heating Swimming Pools via Intelligent Control Systems

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11 September 2017

Anyone who has ever visited the beach in the Danish holiday town of Blokhus will know that the strong current and imposing waves can sometimes make bathing there dangerous. Thus, indoor heated swimming pools are quite popular in the area. Currently ten houses in the area with their own indoor heated pools are participating in the EU-funded research- and development project, SmartNet, which is currently testing flexible energy consumption in Italy, Spain and Denmark. The purpose of the project is to establish future solutions to frequency, voltage and bottleneck issues in the existing electricity transmission network.

Danish involvement in the project consists of, for example, intelligent control of energy consumption in summer cottages and pool houses. A significant share of the heating of swimming pools is regulated through changes in either electricity prices, CO2 signals or optimal energy efficiency.

-By ‘storing’ wind power in swimming pools in the SmartNet project, we are helping to solve some of the balance and voltage challenges we face in the grid, as more and more of its power comes from wind energy, explains one of the Danish partners, Professor Henrik Madsen from DTU Compute. He is well aware that the electricity will not be stored as one stores power in a battery. The idea is that the time of the water’s heating shifts.

From 0 to 1,000 per cent wind power
In Denmark, wind turbines covered what is equivalent to approximately 45 per cent of the energy consumption during the first six months of 2017. Along the Jutlandic west coast, the coverage is often even higher. In some parts of the electricity network, the wind turbines deliver from zero to 1,000 per cent of the consumption, which means that there are moments when the “exports” from some of these areas are particularly great.

One swimming pool can not balance a lot, but by using an aggregator, which collects and transfers heating from one place to another, volume is achieved.

-We hope that we as an electricity grid company will gain more insight into how we can operate our grid in the future differently to the way we do now. These years, significant changes are taking place on both the production and consumption side. Therefore it is not certain whether the best thing to do is to reinforce the cables. Through the SmartNet project, we can gain insight into how the electricity consumption may be controlled and what we will need to make it work, says engineer and project manager at SE, Johan Ungermann Poulsen.

The first ten summer cottages with swimming pools heated by heat pumps have been connected to the 10/0.4 kV transformer station in the Danish town of Saltum, and as a part of the project, SE delivers e.g. data on the local grid’s quality. Johan Ungermann Poulsen estimates that the area’s grid actually functions quite well, but as it is envisaged that more electric cars and solar cells will connect to the grid in the future, it may be necessary to manage electricity consumption in pool houses, companies with heating equipment as well as the consumption from other consumers more tightly.

In the future, we may encounter critical peak loads in summer, if many holiday guests within the one area charge their electric car at the same time, says Johan Ungermann Poulsen.

Value for house owners and quests
Metering equipment has been installed at the ten pool houses in Blokhus and data is now being delivered to DTU Compute and the rental company NOVOSOL, which administers the summer cottages. Soon, the houses will also be equipped with sensors, thermostats and control systems. In total, 30 of NOVOSOL’s approximately 1,000 Danish pool houses will supply the project with chlorine.

-We are participating in the R&D project because we want to create value for the house owners and for holiday quests, says project manager Thomas Kieldsen from NOVOSOL

Since pools of this nature normally use 30-35,000 kWh electricity a year, there is obviously a desire to optimize electricity consumption. Another financial aspect is the fact that house owners are subject to taxation for the income they receive from tourists’ electricity bills – even if the electricity consumption is a direct expense for the owners.

Through the experiences gained in the F&U- project, we hope to reduce electricity costs by up to twenty per cent, says Thomas Kieldsen, while Henrik Madsen from DTU Compute estimates a reduction of up to one third of the electricity costs can be achieved if hourly settlements and real-time tariffs are introduced.

Developing market models
SmartNet has received over EUR 13 million in funding from EU’s Horizon 2020-programme, which means that the project is now a larger R&D project. It is run by the research centre RSE in Milano and it focuses on flexible electricity consumption as well as coordination between Distribution System Operators (DSOs) and Transmission System Operators (TSOs).

-The European DSOs and TSOs are facing the same challenges. With wind turbines and solar cells, electricity production has become more de-centralized and fluctuates more. Through SmartNet, we try to develop market models, which can be used by DSOs to regulate voltage and manage local bottlenecks andTSOs can use them to regulate frequencies and prevent regional bottlenecks, explains Henrik Madsen from DTU Compute, where the employees are experts in mathematical models.

It is precisely modelling that is an important part of the set-up for pool houses. They deliver data for tourists’ time of arrival, electricity consumption, temperatures, CO2-levels among other things. This data will then be integrated with data for local and regional weather forecast, prognoses for price movement in the electricity market and potential challenges to the grid etc. This will happen through solutions implemented by the technical aggregator, ENFOR, who will enable a smart, automatic control system for the heating of swimming pools within the comfort limits owners have put in place. For instance, if the water is 30 degrees °C and the voltage of comfort is between 25 and 31 degrees, the power may be turned off momentarily. 

Need for reform of taxes
- The weather is unsettled, and we can change the control system every fifth minute. In the future, we will be able to do it even faster than that. Thanks to the experiences from CITIES and other former R&D-projects, we will be able to provide advanced control systems. So, while we wait for the political and administrative framework to be in place – not least of which concerns costs and tariffs – we have a number of solutions ready to enable the flexible energy system that everyone is talking about, says Henrik Madsen.

With artificial intelligence, it is also possible to learn how summer houses ”behave” in relation to thebehaviours of quests. Novosol and the owners will thus gain a useful insight into future investment priorities within, for example, energy renovations.

-These possibilities will now be explored in Denmark. If successful , we would like to extend these benefits to house owners in the others countries, where we operate. Since the economic and technical circumstances in Denmark, Croatia and France are different, the solutions need to be adapted to local conditions, says Thomas Kieldsen from NOVOSOL, who has 44,000 holiday houses in Europe in their pay – out of these, 10,000 are located in Denmark.

SmartNet will run over a period of three years. The Danish companies participating the project are SE, DTU Compute, NOVOSOL, Energinet.dk (TSO),  Eurisco (software/communication) and ENFOR (forecasting/control)

- Source: The Danish Intelligent Energy Alliance

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