Volume 59, Issue 1 - Recent Trends in Energy Informatics Research / Guest Editors: Sebastian Lehnhoff, Astrid Nieße

The increasing dissemination of Distributed Energy Resources (DER) will have a significant impact on the planning and operation of the electricity grid. Many of these DERs have operational constraints e.g. weather conditions or self-sufficiency of resources or interactions within a multimodal environment. Today, established concepts on Virtual Power Plants aggregation often lack the possibility of automated, standardized and near real-time reconfiguration in case of failures or planning issues with these volatile DERs. In spite of standardization approaches a standardized description model for energy resources and their capabilities which allows aggregators to automatically find contributing or substituting DERs is lacking. The recent development in the electricity grid towards increasing Information and Communication capabilities can be used for a large scale information and allocation system for energy resources. Such a registry for energy resource capabilities will provide the opportunity for DERs to promote actual information about their capabilities based on forecasts and operational plans. Aggregators can select appropriate resources for their VPP configuration and reconfiguration while system operators can e.g. observe the grid status and the allocated capacities of all active DERs registered at the registry. In order to achieve the goals and to optimize the usage of especially renewable DERs, three main research question have to be addressed: (1) The definition of a standardized, abstracted and generalized description model for DER capabilities. (2) The interoperability and communicational requirements for such energy services. (3) Identifying the current applications and potential contributions to the development of future energy markets.

In modern energy grids, also termed smart grids , energy and information from different stakeholders are exchanged, processed and analyzed. An increasing number of data from customers is collected and transmitted for billing, scheduling and monitoring. In order to protect customer privacy, (i) the privacy gap of existing and proposed use cases needs to be assessed; and (ii) new methods and protocols need to be developed that allow a privacy-preserving and provably secure processing of data and information. This paper evaluates existing solutions and proposes novel approaches to privacy enhancing technologies in the smart grid user domain.

To support the utilization of renewable energies, an optimized operation of energy systems is important. In recent years, many different optimization methods have been used in this field, including exact solvers and metaheuristics. Quite often, evolutionary algorithms yield good optimization results and allow for a flexible formulation of the optimization problem. Nevertheless, most approaches do not respect the dynamic nature of energy systems with time-dependent properties and stochastic variations. In this work, typical uncertainties are categorized and appropriate measures that help handling uncertainties in energy systems are presented and evaluated using an implementation of a building energy management system that may be used in simulation and practical application.

In planning transmission lines with the use of Geographic Information Systems, the use of the Least Cost Path (LCP) algorithm has been established while relevant criteria are modeled using Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA). Despite their established use, this combination (MCDA/LCP) often leads to results that do not correspond to realistic conditions. Therefore, the MCDA/LCP computation must usually be optimized on an algorithmic level as well as on the decision model and the underlying data relevant for the MCDA. The current paper presents the state-of-the-art of an ongoing research project that aims to solve these issues. First results are promising since a stable algorithm has been developed that computes a cost surface, a Least Cost Corridor (LCC), a LCP, and the transmission towers' positions by simple additive weighting based on user's weights. Optimizations on the MCDA models have already been implemented and tested. The findings are integrated into a 3D Decision Support System which aims at facilitating the work of TL planners by realistic modeling and by reducing the approval process for new TL.

The further integration of storage into the electric power system is unavoidable regarding the still increasing share of renewables and current market developments. Therefore a lot of different storage technologies are available today. The presented PhD-Thesis project will focus on integrating battery storage to the power system under different system and market conditions. Therefore, coupled control algorithms for single and virtual battery storage systems have to be developed depending on the battery's scope. For analyzing the reliability of different battery's scopes, the developed models will be integrated into an electric power system model for studying their influence on the power system and market concerning different development scenarios (renewables, nuclear phase-out). First actions dealt with the provision of Frequency Containment Reserve (FCR) power by a virtual battery storage under certain conditions in Germany. First results show appropriate working of implemented control algorithms and reliability for different shareholders.

This work presents two implementation attacks against cryptographic algorithms. Based on these two presented attacks, this thesis shows that the assessment of physical attack complexity is error-prone. Hence, cryptography should not rely on it. Cryptographic technologies have to be protected against all implementation attacks, have they already been realized or not. The development of countermeasures does not require the successful execution of an attack but can already be carried out as soon as the principle of a side channel or a fault attack is understood.