The Illuminator
An Open Source Energy System Integration Development Kit
Aihui Fu (TU Delft - Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science)
Raghav Saini (Student TU Delft)
Remko Koornneef (TU Delft - Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science)
Arjen van der Meer (TU Delft - Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science)
Peter Palensky (TU Delft - Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science)
Milos Cvetkovic (TU Delft - Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science)
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Abstract
This paper introduces a flexible and extendable easy-to-use energy system integration development kit: the Illuminator. The Illuminator illustrates challenges arising from the energy transition. Hence, it is suitable in education and for demonstration. It also acts as a sandbox for testing new research concepts, and particularly, distributed energy coordination algorithms in real and non-real time. The Illuminator technology is primarely a modular software platform developed to run on a Raspberry Pi (RasPi) cluster. It is open-source, available at GitHub and developed in Python. The Illuminator comprises models of common energy technologies, such as photovoltaic (PV) panels, wind turbines, batteries, and hydrogen systems. The uniqueness of the Illuminator is in its modularity and flexibility to reconfigure scenarios and cases on the fly, even by non-experts in a plug-and-play fashion. This paper introduces the Illuminator and shows its performance in a simple case study.