Energypolis in the middle of the Swiss alps is a new innovative campus area that is just being built with a focus on energy innovation. It is also one of FlexiGrid’s pilot sites.
Switzerland hosts one of FlexiGrid’s pilot sites: the Energypolis campus. The campus consists of three buildings and an infrastructure for energy production, conversion and storage (thermal, electrical and chemical). The FlexiGrid partner HES-SO, responsible for the demonstration activities related to the campus, is currently working on the development of advanced algorithms for an optimized control of its installations. Concretely, the tasks performed by HES-SO during the FlexiGrid project are diverse: integration of its energy system, monitoring of its installations, establishment of a communication with the IoT platform developed by SIMAVI, development of simulation models and control algorithms, participation in a flexibility market, performance of full-scale tests, etc.
HES-SO’s final objective in the project is to demonstrate, in collaboration with DSO OIKEN, the performance of an electrical flexibility service. Indeed, the drastic increase of distributed energy resources (DER) forces network operators to find innovative solutions to guarantee the security of their network. HES-SO expects to demonstrate the feasibility and relevance of balancing services and intends to offer an interesting option for DSO OIKEN. Besides that, HES-SO wants to study the flexibility potential of the different components of its energy system and how these components could be optimally used. Due to its ambitious objectives and to the variety of its activities, HES-SO actively participates in demo areas 1, 3 and 4 and collaborates regularly with other pilot sites such as those in Turkey or Sweden.