João Soares

Polytechnic Institute of Porto | IPP · GECAD - Grupo de Investigação em Engenharia do Conhecimento e Apoio à Decisão

Call for publications, Applied Energy, ELSEVIER Changes in technology, climate issues, and the need to replace fossil fuels with renewables are forcing a major energy sector restructuring. The widespread adoption of local energy communities enables the combined local generation of different energy vectors, including electricity, heat, cooling power...

Adopting distributed energy resources (DERs) is the key to a low-carbon future in electrical distribution systems (EDS). However, integrating DERs increases the uncertainties in the distribution system expansion planning (DSEP). Thus, the long-term DSEP faces a planning risk brought by the uncertainty of demand, electric vehicle (EV) demand, renewa...

The notion of prosumers, people who create and consume energy, has emerged in the energy sector as a result of the fast integration of renewable energy sources and advances in digital technology. Platforms for peer-to-peer (P2P) energy trading have come to light as viable ways to allow prosumers to conduct direct energy transactions within small gr...

This paper presents a variable neighborhood descent (VND) algorithm for the service restoration problem (SRP) in distribution systems. The restoration problem appears when a permanent fault occurs in the system. The fault must be localized and isolated from the rest of the system. As a consequence of the isolation, the downstream area is de-energiz...

In order to pave the way for a modernized electricity grid with distributed energy sources and storage, a direct energy transaction among peers in the local electricity market (LEM) is emerging. The design of the local energy market has frequently concentrated on its structures and technological problems, but not much on how to increase the willing...

In order to encourage energy saving and the adoption of renewable sources, this study provides a comprehensive experimental framework that integrates socioeconomic and behavioral objectives for the local energy community. The experiment aims to find out how successfully using behavioral interventions might encourage customers to save electrical ene...

Changes will be required to handle the increased power flow in the network as the distribution infrastructure ages and the number of EVs and renewable grows. Designing and operating an intelligent network that reacts to changing power flows to ensure the optimal operation is the most economical option than fortifying the network with heavier cables...

Hydrogen is a promising commodity, a renewable secondary energy source, and feedstock alike, to meet greenhouse gas emissions targets and promote economic decarbonization. A common goal pursued by many countries, the hydrogen economy receives a blending of public and private capital. After European Green Deal, state members created national policie...

Renewable-energy-based microgrids (MGs) are being advocated around the world in response to increasing energy demand, high levels of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, energy losses, and the depletion of conventional energy resources. However, the high investment cost of the MGs besides the low selling price of the energy to the main grid are two main...

This chapter proposes an electricity customers characterization framework supported by knowledge discovery in a database (KDD). Data mining (DM) techniques are explored to be applied to the power system field. The proposed DM techniques include clustering algorithms approaches, electrical customers' characterization models, and forecasting techniqu...

Complex optimization problems are often associated to large search spaces and consequent prohibitive execution times in finding the optimal results. This is especially relevant when dealing with dynamic real problems, such as those in the field of power and energy systems. Solving this type of problems requires new models that are able to find near...

The increased penetration of renewables in power distribution networks has motivated significant interest in local energy systems. One of the main goals of local energy markets is to promote the participation of small consumers in energy transactions. Such transactions in local energy markets can be modeled as a bi-level optimization problem in whi...

Nowadays, the buildings have an important role on high demand of electricity energy. Therefore, the energy management of the buildings may have significant influence on reducing the electricity consumption. Moreover, Electric Vehicles (EVs) have been considering as a power storage devices in Smart Buildings (SBs) aiming to reduce the cost and consu...

Due to the rising concern for the environment and sustainability issues, the transportation system is experiencing important changes to its paradigm, with the increasing replacement of internal combustion vehicles by electric ones. Consequently, the electric systems need to adapt to the ever-increasing load demand from the grid and the challenge to...

Energy resource management is a concept that should be considered in energy systems due to the significant penetration of dispersed energy resources. Thus, the efficiency in the electrical network operation can be improved and the end-user costs reduced. In this way, an energy resource aggregator plays an important role in managing the demand and g...

Evolutionary computation is attracting attention in the energy domain as an alternative to tackle inherent mathematical complexity of some problems related to high-dimensionality, non-linearity, non-convexity, multimodality, or discontinuity of the search space. In this context, the research community launched the 2020 ”Competition on Evolutionary...

This research paper presents a deterministic optimization technique for the optimal location of normally closed switches on a realistic medium voltage distribution network located in Portugal. The goal is to minimize the expected outage costs to consumers in conjunction with normally closed switches capital investment, installation, and annual...

In this paper, a collective residential building is considered in which the following points are taken into consideration: (i) a flexibility value of Contract Power (CP) is considered for each consumer; (ii) it is assumed a single CP for the entire building; (iii) an energy resource manager entity is considered to manage the energy resources in the...

The electrical distribution system (EDS) has undergone major changes in the last decade due to the increasing integration of distributed generation (DG), particularly renewable energy DG. Since renewable energy resources have uncertain generation, energy storage systems (ESSs) in the EDS can reduce the impact of those uncertainties. Besides, electr...

The energy resource management (ERM) problem in today’s energy systems is complex and challenging due to the increasing penetration of distributed energy resources with uncertain behavior. Despite the improvement of forecasting tools, and the development of strategies to deal with this uncertainty (for instance, considering Monte Carlo simulation t...

The development of new technologies such as renewable energy sources, energy storage devices, and electric vehicles has changed the structure of the distribution grid to an active grid with bidirectional power flow. This paper introduces the concept of a smart island and its challenges and an isolated smart microgrid mode. Furthermore, this review...

Due to the fast growth of energy consumption in buildings, it is crucial to ensure sustainability demands through the use of renewable energies. The solar energies have been standing out and, as a result, the forecast of photovoltaic (PV) production has received broad attention. However, the intermittent nature of the generated power brings some un...

During the past few years the transport matrix received many policies to push for the sector decarbonization. The electric vehicles and charging infrastructure increased a lot motivated by European Union directives and countries legislations, becoming national policies framework. Considering the electricity market dynamics, the electrification of t...

The increased penetration of renewables in distribution power systems has motivated researchers to take significant interest in local energy transactions. The major goal of Local Energy Markets (LEM) is to promote the participation of small consumers in energy transactions and providing an opportunity for transactive energy systems. Such energy tra...

This editorial document provides the main motivations and a brief description of each paper published in the “Rethinking the Distribution Power Network Planning and Operation for a Sustainable Smart Grid and Smooth Interaction with Electrified Transportation” Special Issue. This Special Issue aims to present several innovative solutions on planning...

Local electricity markets are emerging solutions to enable local energy trade for the end users and provide grid support services when required. Various models of local electricity markets (LEMs) have been proposed in the literature. The peer-to-peer market model appears as a promising structure among the proposed models. The peer-to-peer market st...

Local electricity markets are a promising idea to foster the efficiency and use of renewable energy at the distribution level. However, as such a new concept, how these local markets will be designed and integrated into existing market structures, and make the most profit from them, is still unclear. In this work, we propose a local market mechanis...

In the coming years, several transformations in the transport sector are expected, associated with the increase in electric vehicles (EVs). These changes directly impact electrical distribution systems (EDSs), introducing new challenges in their planning and operation. One way to assist in the desired integration of this technology is to allocate E...

Typically, residential buildings neither allow flexibility in the individual contract power capacity nor considers buildings as unique electricity consumers. In this work, a smart building is designed that each electricity customer has flexible contract power and the whole collective residential building has a single contract power. A management en...

The penetration of distributed energy resources in distribution networks is currently enabling the emergence of local energy markets (LEM). However, considering renewable generation and load demand variability is crucial to realize such transactive energy systems. In this work, we propose a bi-level optimization model for bidding in LEM, considerin...

Due to the increasing electricity consumption in the residential sector, new control systems emerged to control the demand side. Some techniques have been developed, such as shaping the curve’s load peaks by planning and shifting the electricity demand for household appliances. This paper presents a comparative analysis for the energy consumption o...

Across Europe, householders have taken the opportunity to produce their electricity, helping them to reduce their electricity bill as well as reducing carbon emissions, by installing rooftop Photovoltaic Panels (PV) on their buildings. New adequate business models are needed for improving the sharing of PV between consumers in a community. Both tec...

This paper presents intelligent energy management with penetration of Distributed Generation (DG) and Electric Vehicles (EVs). The envisaged problem is a hard combinatorial Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (MILP) problem due to the continuous, discrete, and binary variables. The proposed problem focuses on minimizing the electricity cost. The MILP...

The growing trend of electric vehicles (EVs) and building integrated photovoltaics (BIPVs) is a promising means to reduce related climate change issues. EV loads can be managed via an aggregator to maximize the usage of green energy produced by photovoltaic units (PV) through smart charging strategies that exploit controllable EV demand connected t...

In this article, a cost optimization problem in local energy markets is analyzed considering fixed-term flexibility contracts between the DSO and aggregators. The DSO procures flexibility while aggregators of different types (e.g., conventional demand response or thermo-load aggregators) offer the service. We solve the proposed model using evolutio...

Generally, energy management in smart buildings is formulated by mixed-integer linear programming, with different optimization goals. The most targeted goals are the minimization of the electricity consumption cost, the electricity consumption value from external power grid, and peak load smoothing. All of these objectives are desirable in a smart...

The current energy strategy of the European Union puts the end-user as a key participant in electricity markets. The creation of energy communities has been encouraged by the European Union to increase the penetration of renewable energy and reduce the overall cost of the energy chain. Energy communities are mostly composed of prosumers, which may...

Electric vehicles have emerged as one of the most promising technologies, and their mass introduction may pose threats to the electricity grid. Several solutions have been proposed in an attempt to overcome this challenge in order to ease the integration of electric vehicles. A promising concept that can contribute to the proliferation of electric...

Given the current state of the society in which we live, in terms of energy pollution, several objectives have been set to try to reduce environmental problems. Some of these goals include an exponential increase in production through renewable energy, and Electric Vehicles (EVs) circulating on roads. Due to this high penetration of distributed ene...

The liberalization of electricity markets has been resulted in the emergence of new players, increasing the competitiveness in the markets, standing those can provide better services for better prices. The knowledge of energy consumers’ profile has been an important tool to help players to make decisions in the electrical sectors. In this paper, a...

The implementation of local electricity markets (LEMs) requires efficient tools that can provide solutions for the optimal management of distributed energy resources (DERs) considering economic and technical aspects. This chapter presents mathematical models for the formulation of optimization problems in LEMs including DERs (renewable distributed...

Every year, the number of electric vehicles (EVs) on the roads has been increasing on a large scale. The electric grid, in this case, must evolve with the high penetration of distributed energy resources such as EVs and renewable energies. Indeed, demand response (DR) programs and the flexibility of EVs can help to mitigate the challenges of the in...

Home appliances constitute an interesting source of flexibility for demand response programs. However, their control and coordination are challenging, since typically a high number of such appliances has to be aggregated in order to provide a sufficient amount of flexibility. Thus, an efficient and scalable control approach is required. In a previo...

Authors: Almeida, Jose, Canizes, Bruno; Soares, Joao; Vale, Zita Type: Energy consumption and renewable generation data Period of data collection: 19-03-2019 to 25-03-2019 (15-minute 672 periods) Resolution: 15 minutes Network: 13-bus MV grid Aggregator list: Aggregator 1: Shopping Mall; Hospital; Fire Station Aggregator 2: 15 houses Aggregat...