Establishing Large-Scale Renewable Reserve Capacity through Distributed Multi-Agent Support

A world-wide trend towards renewable and ecologically clean forms of energy has been steadily growing. Private investments are encouraged and heavily subsidized in most of the European countries, through tax deductions, and even more through a very favorable refund program for feeding electric power from renewable sources into the public network. Due to the limited predictability of the output of renewable power capacities it has long become the policy of grid operators and large power distributors to cover the differences between demand and supply with immense reserve and balancing power capacities based on fossil, and thus predictable, energy sources. With growing renewable power feed-in the demand for reserve and balancing power grows over-proportionally. In 2005 the European Union for the Coordination of Transmission of Electricity (UCTE) demanded to impose an obligation on grid operators to reduce integration costs for renewable energy capacities. This could obviously be possible once the renewable capacities sources could serve as reserve capacity. Since these are widely distributed and dispersed, their combined effect may well be used to guarantee a stable supply. The remaining problem behind is that the largely unpredictable character of wind and solar power supply is to be administered financially and in terms of timely transmission. We introduce a novel solution for the distributed negotiation process, which is compatible with electric distribution procedures. This is part of our DEZENT (decentralized management of electric power distribution) project.