Simulating the World’s Power Grid with Open Innovation

December 29, 2016 By IdeaConnection

An open innovation project from Germany is helping energy researchers with numerous endeavors and enterprises.

OpenGridMap is crowdsourcing data related to the world’s power grid and making it freely available to others. The aim is to produce realistic input data for simulation studies in several fields, such as simulating the feeding of renewable energy into the grid and modeling its effects.

Data Collection Challenges

Power grid data can be difficult to come by and can involve talking to utility companies and signing NDAs. It is also a huge undertaking to gather the material. Other problems include out-of-date data and the fact that in some countries the information isn’t digitized.

With OpenGridMap, volunteers use an app on their smart phones to capture photos and location information about electrical infrastructure i.e. transformer substations, power lines and solar power plants.

Building the Map

The volunteer-collected data is sent to a server in the Department of Computer Science at the Technical University of Munich, which helps to build a global map of electricity power grids.  It’s a monumental task made a lot easier thanks to the crowd’s help.

“Contracting a company to compile the infrastructure for an entire country, or even the entire world would not be affordable for the researchers,” said Jose Rivera, director of the project, in an interview with Campus Technology.

As all the incoming data is verified, it is added to an online map and made available to anyone with an interest, such as scientists and engineers.

For more information about the open innovation project, click here and watch the short explainer video below.

 


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Reader Comments


As a technical problem I used the travelling salesman analogy , a radial triangulation to give interacting variables from all directions from all points,
This catered for changing variables at any moment.

As power loss over distance is a constant I have used the
(HUNGRY PIGEON SYnDROmE) .As with a bird energy is dispersed over distance, hence looking for more energy (FOOD) to substain travel, distance.

As no point missed a full map of the millions of veriables becomes script.
Set values can be maintained , over values can be drawn down by re-routing (FLIGHT-PLAN).
Control independantly of power plants has been used for 50 years, this brings us to todays problem, - Unauthorised use and control.
In a few short years Accumulation of generated power will be stored at these plants and reversed back into the local area overcomming most of the associated problems of intercept at a cost durable for longevity.
Posted by Stephen Fitton on January 5, 2017

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