The Illuminator

An Open Source Energy System Integration Development Kit

Conference paper (2023)

Authors

A. Fu Intelligent Electrical Power Grids - EEMCS
Raghav Saini Student
R.N. Koornneef ESP LAB - EEMCS
A.A. van der Meer Intelligent Electrical Power Grids - EEMCS
P. Palensky Electrical Sustainable Energy
M. Cvetkovic Intelligent Electrical Power Grids - EEMCS
Research Group
Intelligent Electrical Power Grids (EEMCS) (TU Delft)
Copyright: © 2023 A. Fu, Raghav Saini, R.N. Koornneef, A.A. van der Meer, P. Palensky, M. Cvetkovic
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/PowerTech55446.2023.10202816
Open source Education Energy transition Energy system integration Demonstration
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Published Date

2023

Language

English

Reuse Rights

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Faculty

Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science

Department

Electrical Sustainable Energy

Research Group

Intelligent Electrical Power Grids

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.