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How a Smart, Decentralized Energy Web Is Essential for Managing Renewable Energy Sources


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Researchers from the Italian research center CREATE-NET recently completed a study that examined the ways in which decentralized, bottom-up design approaches could play a crucial role in managing complex, massive-scale networks. The researchers determined the features that a decentralized approach would need to support large-scale networks and provide the necessary degrees of reliability. They also demonstrated how these concepts could be applied to the management of the future generation of energy smart grids—which will be characterized by distributed and renewable energy sources—and dubbed the resulting system the Energy Web.

The Energy Web depicts a future in which bidirectional flows of energy will resemble the way information and data are exchanged on the Internet today, says study co-author Daniele Miorandi.

Energy Web The Energy Web is a power distribution system designed for managing a large-scale, largely distributed network of renewable energy sources. The figure shows the interaction of different parts of the Energy Web, which includes incentives for producers and consumers of energy and allows autonomous self-organization of agents due to evolutionary processes. Credit: Carreras, et al. / IEEE
The key to the Energy Web is the bottom-up design, in which laws are implemented to enable desired global behaviors to emerge from local interactions among individual components. The new approach focuses on reliability and enabling the system to evolve over time.

From PhysOrg.com
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Abstracts Copyright © 2010 Information Inc., Bethesda, Maryland, USA


 

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