Evaluation of Renewable Energy and Flexibilisation Technologies for the Deployment of Smart Cities through the Application of Geographic Information Systems
All over the world, cities are facing significant challenges due to urbanisation and ever growing population which add more pressure on the power supply system due to the increasing electricity demand. The transitions of electrical supply structure towards more sustainable systems take place at different scales of the power supply system, particularly, on the distribution level. Smart Cities is an emerging topic that has been heeded by policy-makers, researchers and markets.
Despite the central role that Geographic Information Systems (GIS) may play in the future smart cities, GIS has not been often acknowledged in the scientific literature neither as a decision-making supporting tool nor as a promising tool for the deployment and implementation of renewable and flexibilsation technologies at the distribution level. GIS offers the opportunity to visualise the spatio-temporal parameters as well as to perform qualitative and quantitative analysis of the results and different scenarios for the deployment of smart city technologies.
The idea behind this contribution is to explore the deployment of renewable energy with electricity demand as a function of space and time at the low voltage levels, that with the help of suitable interfaces to databases and analysis tools as well as non-technical applications, such as economic and social issues, if necessary, systemic investigations in the various disciplines are also possible. Moreover, the investigation of different scenarios for smart cities is planned. A key element is the suitable integration of GIS systems tools, open source data and open models.
This work is panned as PhD thesis, which aims to systematically investigate different scenarios of self-consumption level as well as analyse the characteristics and roles of flexibilisation technologies like storage in promoting higher autarky grad in a city like Oldenburg. Hence it is worthy to address the following research questions: How can GIS systems strategically contribute to the deployment of future smart cities? How to determine and localise the self-consumption players at the low voltage level? What is the role of grid operator in a high self-consumption scenario in future smart city? What are the opportunities offered by the GIS systems in the evaluation of the flexibilsation of smart city technologies? What is the economic and social impact of implementing GIS systems for the applications of smart cities?