DER Impact Calculator
The design of a tool, “DER Impact Calculator”, is requested such that it can demonstrate the total electric demand/generation time-series for a selected site, once representative parameters are provided by the user. Each site can have all or some of the following components that can contribute to the electric demand/generation time-series in 15-minute time resolution for one day:
- Conventional electric demand (household appliances, lighting, office buildings, etc.)
- Solar PV generation
- Battery energy storage system (BESS) charging/discharging
- Electric heat pump (HP) consumption
- Personal electric vehicles charging
It is requested that the calculator is to be delivered in an executable form (the source code not to be provided), which is compiled on a platform (e.g., Linux, Windows) that will be identified by the vendor as well as the contractor responsible for the design of the user interface.
The calculator is required accommodate the characteristics of multiple regions in the world, determined together with the vendor. The sales and marketing teams as well as the customers of the vendor will be using the calculator through a user interface.
The vendor plans to deploy a “grid calculator” so that the customers as well as the sales & the marketing teams can use such emulators to demonstrate the impacts of distributed energy resources, DER, on the following:
- the electricity consumption patterns at the end-users (e.g., households, offices),
- the power capacity of the end-user sites (e.g., fuse size), and
- the branch (e.g., overhead distribution line, cable, distribution transformer) loadings.
With the help of the user interface, the calculator can help the customer identify grid violations as well as the potential investment opportunities to solve the problems by resorting to control mechanisms and/or new investments on grid equipment such as cables, transformers, utility-scale battery energy storage systems, etc.
The “DER Impact Calculator” is expected to be capable of producing the approximate time series of solar PV production, electric heat pump (HP) consumption, electric vehicle (EV) charging, conventional electric demand as well as the battery energy storage system (BESS) charging/discharging profiles for each site connected at a node for a selected representative day in 15-min time resolution. The calculator is required to receive the input through a user interface and to provide the output in a commonly accepted file format to be read by the user interface.