Johanneberg Science Park: FED – Fossil-free Energy Districts

Description:

By balancing the urgent need of energy transition with an ever-increasing energy demand, FED aims to play a key role in creating fossil free cities in Europe.
FED has established a district scale innovative demonstrator of a local energy marketplace, uniquely integrating electricity, district heating and district cooling. In line with the aims of the Energy Union and EU energy targets, FED enables a fossil-free and secure supply of energy as well as long-term business models for a future energy market with higher use of sustainable energy sources.
The FED project started in 2016 and is funded by the EU initiative Urban Innovative Actions. The evaluation of the operation will continue until February 2020. Partners are City of Gothenburg, Johanneberg Science Park, Akademiska hus, Chalmersfastigheter, Chalmers University of Technology, Ericsson, RISE, Business Region Gothenburg and Gothenburg Energy.
What is the impact of your case:
By delivering a smart grid-connected local energy system, balancing demand and supply and integrating electricity, heating and cooling; as well as testing a local energy market and trading system, FED impacts many areas in line with European energy transition targets.
More specifically the FED-project supports the EU in the challenges to drastically decrease the use of fossil-based energy and increase the security of supply.
The FED system can be adjusted to optimize reduction of either cost, CO2 emission and/or primary energy. Preliminary simulations show that, if balanced correctly, a substantial CO2 emission reduction can be achieved together with a cost reduction of the operational cost.
It should be noted that FED is operated in Sweden, a country that already has low use of fossil energy sources. When implemented in countries with less favorable conditions, the system is estimated to have a larger total impact. The system can enable a district to become 100% self-sustainable on fossil-free energy, thus creating a large impact if the overlaying system depends highly on fossil energy sources.
Environmental and energy supply improvements
100% fossil-free local energy production with various storage, generation and distribution solutions
80% reduction of energy peaks causing import of external fossil-based energy
Business, growth and research developments The FED local energy market leads to new business and revenues for the real-estate owners and users, utility companies and suppliers. Stakeholders have substantially invested in solutions such as thermal energy storage and solar PVs on a long-term basis. The FED project ends in 2019, but the campus testbed will remain open to researchers and companies to test the new energy solutions needed in the transition towards a sustainable society. Up to this date, 11 SMEs are testing their innovative solutions in the FED system, 7 research projects that will utilize the FED-testbed have been initiated, 4 students have used FED as a basis for their master theses.

How is your case innovative:

Since 2017, FED aims to develop, demonstrate and replicate a novel district level energy system, uniquely integrating three different energy carriers (electricity, district heating and district cooling). This solution embraces and enhances the use of technologies such as PVs, heat-pumps and energy storages into larger system. FED is designed to free flexibility resources and will drastically reduce peak loads and the use of fossil primary energy. FED makes it possible for cities to convert to 100% fossil free energy. Gothenburg, where FED is developed and tested, has a climate strategy how to reach this goal.
The FED solutions consist of three cornerstones:
1.A unique demonstrator area – The university campus with about 15 000 end-users is used as a testbed. It has a well-balanced set of property owners, energy infrastructure, and users, including prosumers as well as buildings with different needs and usage profiles. The area is exempted from the law of concession for electricity distribution, making it possible to test and validate an innovative local energy market. The prerequisites to optimize the use of primary and secondary energy using intermediate storage are well developed, as they are for generation, storage and distribution.2.FED System solution – Our solution optimizes the use of low-grade energy to replace primary energy. Adding fossil-free energy sources while optimizing different buildings’ usage profiles; one building’s energy needs is balanced with the surplus of another. Intermediate storage, fundamental to success, consists of heating storage in the building’s structure, an innovative cooling storage based on phase changing material technology and batteries for electricity. Additionally, a new ICT service manages efficiently the energy marketplace.3.An innovative business model – Creating new sustainable markets. The success of FED is based on cooperation and energy exchange between several stakeholders. To make it happen, a local energy market creating business value for each stakeholder has been developed.

Implementation:

Substantial investments, such as solar PVs and various types of energy storages have been implemented on campus and each producing, consuming and storing unit have been connected to a cloud-based IoT platform developed by Ericsson.
The FED digital marketplace is programmed to trade electricity, heating and cooling within the district in a way that optimizes the use of locally produced, sustainable energy, thus saving costs as well as reducing imported energy from fossil sources. In order to make accurate trading decisions the system receives input from various sources, such as weather forecasts and electricity spot prices.
Since the beginning of 2019 (according to schedule), the FED-system is running in stable operation around the clock. 52 market entities throughout the testbed area are connected to the digital marketplace, with only minor components still in commission to be added during the first quarter of the year.
In addition to the development of the marketplace, FED is also tasked with bringing forward recommendations regarding policy issues as well as evaluating opportunities and obstacles for its replication in other European cities. There has been great interest from cities, companies and other projects to learn more about how FED could be used which has resulted in 7 replication cases ranging from idea to started projects, , where the FED-system has been included as a pilot or demonstrator or replications are being investigated in new development areas.
The successful implementation of the FED project has been dependent on the effective and open collaboration of nine local partners, working in an ecosystem that includes the whole innovation chain. All partners meet in person on a biweekly basis to discuss the progress of the project and the engagement of each partner is recognized and highlighted in communication activities such as films, articles and seminars.