ReMaP – Current status of energy research
With its Energy Strategy 2050 Switzerland aims – beside other goals – to promote the use of domestic renewable energy and to develop the electricity power grid, which plays a decisive role in the upgrading of the system of electricity power supply. A lot of research needs to be done to achieve these ambitious goals. An important research project in this area is ReMaP and its status quo was presented at the Paul Scherrer Institute PSI on 28 September.
Within the Renewable Management and Real-Time Control Platform (ReMaP), ETH Zurich, the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI), the Swiss Federal Laboratory for Materials Science and Technology (Empa), Smart Grid Solutions, Super Computing Systems, Adaptricity, and National Instruments join competencies and resources to jointly tackle challenges and opportunities on the pathway towards the future energy system based on renewable sources. The project is supported by the Swiss Federal Office of Energy, the ETH Foundation, as well as in-kind contributions from project partners. It is open for partners from academia, industry and the public sector.
The established ReMaP-Platform combines research and technology transfer platforms. While NEST, move and ehub at Empa have a focus on buildings, neighborhoods and mobility, the ESI-Platform at PSI is working on energy conversion and storage technologies. Within the ReMaP Program, these platforms are interconnected on the controls level and an overarching controls and simulation framework is added.
This enables the combined development and validation of promising energy systems with their complex interconnections. Currently, ten research projects are carried out on the platform.
The ReMaP Event on September 28th, 2021 was introduced by Thomas J. Schmidt (PSI), Gianfranco Guidati (ETH Zurich), and Christian Schaffner (ETH Zurich). The status update of currently running projects showed interesting insights, i.e., into the economics of promising prosumage systems (i.e., systems which can be producers and consumers) participating on the electricity market with power-to-x technologies in Switzerland or predictive control algorithms for future hydrogen refueling stations.
Updates on the various projects were provided by multiple expert speakers and structured around the focus areas energy storage, distributed energy systems, and the application of the ReMaP Platform. The event finished with a guided tour to the Energy System Integration (ESI) Platform at PSI for both the virtual- and local participants.
On-site, numerous institutions were represented among which guests from Siemens, GE, Alpiq, ewz, Venios GmbH, SPF Institut für Solartechnik, Swissmem, and more.