GEM4GF

GEM4GF – Green Energy Management for Green Farms

CHALLENGE

Controlling the electricity use and cost for water pumps and cold warehouses is a crucial task for vegetable farmers in Eastern Austria. Electricity costs often make up a large portion of operating costs for vegetable farmers and rising temperatures require high-consuming irrigation systems more frequently. More and more farmers have started to use solar photovoltaic (PV) systems to generate their own electricity instead of using gas-powered pumps or getting electricity from the grid for cold warehouses. However, often it is not clear how to best use the produced electricity and how much electricity a solar PV system can produce.

AIM

The GEM4GF pilot aims at designing, installing, and operating an energy management and steering system within the energy community of vegetable farmers in Lassee.  In a future scenario, Mr. Paul Weiss (the head of the Lassee cooperative) can at any time via a web-based solution, or similar, keep an overview of current energy production of PV systems at irrigation pumps, houses or cooled warehouses and gets a recommendation on when to turn on irrigation pumps and when to turn down cooled warehouses to optimize consumption from own PV production.

HOW

In an initial step, the current available PV systems and their production are modelled. As an option, additional PV systems and their consumption profile are proposed. In a second step existing weather data forecasts are used to predict own PV production. As a third step this production is mapped with the demand and flexibility of cooled warehouses, irrigation pumps and houses. The demand and production are measured using existing smart meter devices. Electricity prices are taken from the existing Austrian Power Grid API. Now the energy optimization starts, and an intelligent algorithm uses past and current consumption data to propose a shift peak demands (e.g., irrigation pumps) to times of low electricity costs or proposes to cool the warehouse when own PV production is strong. A first prototype based on smart city districts already exist here http://nano-it.azurewebsites.net/scenarios-api/ and will be used to integrate the farmers use case.

BENEFIT

The main benefit will be delivered to the Lassee farmer collectives:

• by increasing the share of electricity that they consume from their own PV (decreasing the amount of surplus electricity produced that they cannot use)
• by reducing their electricity bill as they benefit from wholesale electricity market price fluctuation and arbitrage
• more energy independence from electricity market prices
• Strengthened local community and north star for other communities to save money and drive the energy transition

These learnings can be beneficial to other farmer collectives.