Modeling and Managing Energy Flexibility Using FlexOffers

The recent spread of distributed renewable energy sources and smart IoT devices offer exciting new possibilities for the use of energy flexibility, opening a new era of the so-called bottom-up or cellular energy systems. In order to harness the full potential of flexibility, flexibility has to be modeled and represented in a manner that can be efficiently managed, manipulated, and traded on a market. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive overview of the FlexOffer concept, which offers an effective way of modeling and managing energy demand and supply flexibilities from a wide range of flexible resources and their aggregates. First, we define the basic concept and present the different phases of the FlexOffer life-cycle. Then, we discuss more advanced internal FlexOffer constraints as well as algorithms for FlexOffer generation, aggregation, disaggregation, and pricing that can significantly reduce energy management and trading complexities and increase overall efficiency. Finally, we present a general decentralized system architecture for trading flexibility (FlexOffers) in existing and new markets. Our experimental results show that (1) FlexOffers can be extracted with up to 98% accuracy, (2) aggregation and disaggregation can scale to 1000K FlexOffers and more, and (3) flexibility can be traded in the NordPool flexi order market while providing up to 89.9% (of optimal) reduction in the energy cost.