Talk by Nicolas Kirsch
© 2023 EPFL
On Tuesday, 9/1/24, Nicolas Kirsch will give the talk "A Distributed Game Theoretic Approach for Optimal Battery Use in an Energy Community". The seminar will start at 11h00 in ME C2 405.
Abstract
With the recent rise of decentralized energy resources like solar panels or batteries, energy communities
(EC) have grown in popularity. Within these communities, several members manage and share local energy
resources with the objective of minimizing the amount of energy sourced from the grid. However, without
collaborative management of loads, some of the locally produced electricity could be unused and sold
back to the grid, hindering the economic and environmental benefits of ECs. A possible way to address
this would be to manage the loads of the community centrally, but this could present computational and
privacy bottleneck. In this talk, I will present a distributed algorithm based on game theory, which provides
optimal battery use to all the members of an EC so that the consumption of local resources is maximized.
The first part of the talk will describe the algorithm designed to solve such distributed optimization
problems. A key component of this work is the transition from a standard centralized game theoretic
resolution approach to a distributed one. Then, its integration into a receding horizon control framework will
be showcased. The performance of this approach is compared to other EC management methods, and it
is shown that it matches the performance of a centralized optimizer and performs better than an EC with
completely individual energy management systems. The algorithms robustness to several imperfect solar
forecasting scenarios is also evaluated, with minimal uncertainty-induced increases in cost.
Bio
Nicolas Kirsch received a Bachelor of Arts and Science from the University College London in 2021. In this
bachelor, he studied physics, mathematics and data science and looked at how to apply these fields to
current geopolitical challenges, in particular the energy transition. He then joined the Master in Energy
Science and Technology at EPFL in which he focused on the optimization and control of energy systems.
He is currently working on his Master Thesis at the CSEM, in which he researches how game theoretic
concepts can be utilized to optimize the consumption of decentralized energy resources in energy
communities. Next to his studies, he enjoys hiking, tennis and cooking dishes from around the world