shortly about us so I'm there on the left so we are site our energy flexibility
software startup who decided to go the open source way two years ago and this
project we're working together with positive design small company in the
Netherlands as well they are more working on the UX part of this so something
where I really know a lot about are these two projects because we are
building flex measures project we denote donated to the Linux Energy
Foundation before you leave the room get some swag over there and together we
built this V2G Liberty project which actually is works as an umbrella for the
rest so vehicle to grid some of you might know roughly what it is it has
been a buzzword going around it basically means other than most of the car
charging that's going on today just power into the car you could actually get
power out of the car for instance back onto the grid here I listed some use
cases why that is supposedly a good idea and specifically the the third one
that might be pretty interesting because in a scenario where you have a
varying energy price now your car could be a trader right and actually the
spreads in the energy markets are increasing by a lot these days it makes
it suddenly interesting and when I look at industry coming up with vehicle to
grid by themselves people observe a lot of delays and I from my perspective it
seems that the the the actual industry players closed source players are looking
to actually deliver an ecosystem right so these are pictures you're getting from
the big names Hyundai Volkswagen Tesla they're always thinking about putting
multiple things in your home basically taking it over and that takes longer and
so something I'm not looking forward to that's why we decided to do this project
it's more than a year ago now so we have more than a year of data from one
location and recently we've attracted some other enthusiasts and there's five
more locations where this is being employed in reality and quickly about
the motivation so why should we do that is this something that I want to you know
sell it was site energy flexibility and focus on that completely actually probably
not site energy flexibility in our flex measures project is about making the
best use of energy flexibility in general but this is very cool to show
that we can do something today we don't have to wait or there's open source
projects if you put them together are super powerful and it was a great way
to bootstrap ourselves to challenge our technology so I'll talk about the stack
the design of what V2G Liberty looks like if you use it and some outlooks
first what do you need in this context to actually get going you won't find a
lot of cars you can use for this the Nissan Leaf is one of the only ones
specifically in 2021 that could do vehicle to grid same goes for the
charger so this is a charger from Spanish company wallbox of course they
promised that open standards like OCPP will be very soon working and that
hasn't happened yet so what was it is you need some kind of computer in your
house this has been mentioned in talks this morning already and then we work
with an energy contract with dynamic tariffs so in the Netherlands that you
already have I think six or seven to choose from that's going very hard but
the tipper for instance is launching in a couple European countries and offers
you that so this is actually the software architecture in a nutshell I don't
want to make it too difficult if you imagine you put this in your house what
you need is to install home assistant so that's this logo here home assistant is
a very stable home automation software and we've basically built V2G Liberty
as a home assistant plug-in that's also actually fun to do it's it's it's nice
and you get a lot of presence like UI widgets and things like that and then
flex measures is actually not running in the house it could it's dockerized you
could put it in the house next to your home automation software and I think a
couple of these enthusiasts who now are using this are doing that but for such a
software it's sometimes nicer to run in the cloud because it's more difficult to
maintain flex measures itself is then responsible to get the relevant real-time
data that's it's important to schedule the cars charging this charging so in
this case the prices that the consumer contract is on we could also get I think
we actually do in a new version it's not listed here we also get some public
data that helps us to look at the co2 levels of your car cost consumption so
there will be another box right there and I talked about this connection right
so we have to somehow talk to the wallbox and we found out for now this
has to be modbus and we found out to how this response and we talked to the
company the wallbox company if we're allowed to put our code in a public
repository if you could see in the code which registers their hardware reacts to
but I think yeah we've sorted it out that was a bit difficult and basically
what we have to do is simply say start or stop the charge or discharging and we
are able to read the state of charge of the battery and on the left side are
some more nicer UX features so you want to put along for a longer ride you want
to tell our system that the car needs to be full and maybe you want some
overrides I'll come to those later so first about the components I I mentioned
home assistant it has been around for a while now I think it has also some
origins in the Netherlands but it's also developed in California now actually
we had a couple of the home assistant people over in a demo because these
people here so that was nice to actually have that also in real life and as I
said you can write plugins to really to do your own logic on top of a home
assistant now thanks measures is the project that I spent the most time with
our company develops that yeah basically it's a data driven platform to get the
best timing for your flexible energy assets when should they be on or off so
and what I'm talking to you today about is an immobility project but we've also
having some commercial projects in industry the built environment and
actually our goal our dream is that this all comes together so for example we're
working on heating now the energy flexibility of heating and heating and
immobility somehow happen right next to each other so that's where we want to
go and flex measures itself has a UI and I'm just showcasing that here but in
our project right now in this V2G Liberty project that wasn't really being
used so what we want is for flex measures to be a back-end that you talk to
through APIs and you built your you usually built your own user interfacing
flexible service or you integrate what flex measures helps you with into your
existing service well that's actually what we did with V2G Liberty so that's
actually a kind of typical home assistant look for your dashboard I think we
have the goal to bring our own style into that when we have the help but that's
what you get and yeah usually you can see what your car is doing what's the
charging power right now what's the state of charge and then we come into the
more interesting or self-built features I will talk about this in another slide
but this basically shows you the state of charge that happened in blue and what
flex measures has advised to happen with that in the upcoming hours and the
energy price and here you have you have the ability as a user to simply say I
don't want this stop the automation or just charge the car right now I don't
care about the optimal result here you see if you've reserved the car and that's
where our partner positive design came in to really think with us well it
if we get to design a V2G application what do we want to experience when we
use it and these are the goals it should basically you want to be happy that
it's there for a few weeks but then you want to stop thinking about it every
day it should just happen and you might look at your end result and be happy it
of course needs to be ready for you to do trips at least trips let's say
groceries hospital go to a nearby town which in the Netherlands of course is
quite easy so Utrecht Amsterdam for instance works with 20 percent of
charge yeah and CO2 saving and cost saving of course other the goals you
can really put numbers on yeah let's let's go one level deeper in the detail
here I'm not sure it was all clear I always said the state of charge history
will be shown to you in blue and then it's shown to you what the planning
would be so here you can see a bit if you look at the price in gray that in
the future you will charge your battery because the price is low and you will
discharge because there's a higher price later and you do that twice actually in
that in that day and the new feature as I said earlier is that we also plotting
the CO2 intensity on the grid that's going to happen in those hours that's
something we are basing on the scheduled coal and gas power for the
upcoming days of course there's also professional services for that somebody
in an earlier talk mentioned electricity map I think that's in the
capital tool that's a third-party integration for cost reasons we
basically developed our own version of that and what's interesting of course
as you see there's a slight correlation and we actually have a plot
somewhere where we looked at the whole here from our data and checked so is
low carbon intensity does that kind of correlate to lower prices because in
that moment you have a lot of sun and wind on the grid which have zero marginal
cost so that can happen and in the day ahead prices of course that's there's
an economics that makes that complex but it does actually happen during the day
during the day you see a correlation in the night not yet so here's one or two
features of this application in V2G Liberty for instance you come home
from some trip you connect the car V2G Liberty talks to the charger and asks
so what's the deal with the car right now what is the state of charge it comes
back as below 20% and then there's only one cause of action we have to get up
back to those 20% so that's just a simple fallback that gets you to 60 to 80
kilometers and and when you've outlived your range anxiety that should be okay
and that other feature I've shown in the UI before as well you can go to
your calendar on your phone and that's where NextCloud comes in here now I
I'm a personal on also the company where NextCloud users and that's why I was so
happy to bring NextCloud in this as well but it's basically just used for the
agenda integration you can use Google Calendar if you need to that's no problem
so you make your own agenda for your car and you create an entry in the agenda
for your car that you're going on a longer on a road trip let's say tomorrow
at 8 o'clock and that will be picked up by V2G Liberty and what's nice here you
see here the mobile view I showed the desktop view before but Home Assistant
even gives you something that looks really well on your mobile mobile app
which is this is basically the same widgets just rearranged so then this
will show up home V2G Liberty will know about that reservation will contact
flex measures automatically flex measures will realize oh there's a new
constraint coming in I need to recompute everything and that will change so here
you see state of charge will go up to a hundred try trying to avoid that price
peak there in the middle do it cost efficiently
all right so where are we now this project so it's working nice first thing
that comes to mind now that we're the other enthusiasts being on board that the
installation effort still a bit high you you know we have written it all out on
that V2G Liberty GitHub read me but as a couple steps you need to install your
Home Assistant and make that plug-in work so there we can have some low-hanging
fruits in Home Assistant you can basically have an actual plug-in that
is downloadable and updates itself and all that you do have configurations to
make in a file that could be a wizard this there's some stuff there it really
helps us also with flex measures to see if it runs in the background like what
kind of monitoring do we need it's really helpful some people are installing
flex measures themselves as well so that's really and you really a techie
enthusiast I will briefly go into some earnings or
economical results so here's some hints that you know sometimes you have a day
where there's there was huge sprite price spreads and your car basically set at
home the whole day and then you can really have a great day with earnings
above the 10 euros in the Netherlands good to keep in mind energy flexibility
is only usable if your asset is there and you're not using it so if you take
your car for long rides every day well there's less time to do something with
it and then you have less earnings excuse me so actually this user is making a
lot of kilometers actually and so here's a report from I think this is ten
months of data and this is an overview we will see how much has been charged and
discharged right so this is actually large parts of these of these kilowatt
hours have actually been charged just to save them and give them back to the
grid at a better time this is what where a lot of policymakers put high hopes
on of course that cars will work as batteries so that the grid can use and
carry energy at the best times well there's a big axle spreadsheet behind
this but if you just look at the the bottom line that you would see they
have driven their car for 3,000 kilowatt hours and paid 200 euros for that
it's a pretty good price and you could compare with scenarios so what if what
if I had just a fixed cost contract from a year ago would you wouldn't get that
today you can you arrive at some price as you all know this changes these
numbers they change so fast these days and you got before the Ukraine crisis
already lots of movement in the markets after that more so this is this is
difficult I think to make these look at these as hard facts like how many euros
will I save if I install this in 2023 or 2024 I will not subscribe on the number
there but their savings and there's some other people making these calculations
also on a more higher level but it's nice to have an actual project you know
this has really happened and we can dive deeper into the data so if anybody's
interested let us know and of course another one a part of the cost is that
the V2G capable chargers are currently much more expensive but I think the
difference is coming down soon right so what we will do the installation I
already mentioned updating V2G Liberty if you have it running and we have a
new version that that can be easier we want to actually show you KPIs you know
what did I save in money or CO2 let's say last month I think per day can also
work now we have more users enthusiasts who install it at home and we run it so
will the learning curve is going up right now in a sense of how much
information we get that's great and there's it's going to be an interesting
year with more things to support I'm not sure what kind of things this project
should support the V2G Liberty project it potentially has to do with demand from
the community but of course if you if chargers actually support OCPP then
that's just a great idea and on the flex measure side so that's something I
also know the the near future a bit I already mentioned that we are tackling
immobility in projects like this but also heat in other projects and we look
at the build environment this has to come together so our our big next
challenge is to really model the energy flexibility from these two usages of
energy combined and and give one make one computation about a building or a
site that uses heat and uses immobility as two big flexible power demands and
and come up with one optimization and then actually automate that so that's
that's our next big milestone and the other thing that's really important of
course to mention is network congestion that's network operators are coming up
with ideas how projects like this are flexible consumers can do their part so
for instance can stop their demands in a specific moment and in a specific region
which would help on the lower and medium parts of the grid and that's also for us
really on the map this is almost at the end of course we need to hear
questions but of course to for people to get in contact and I'm just listening
to the best contact points for each of the projects for V2G liberty that's
just come to the GitHub project and interact there flex measures itself is
has more channels that you can contact us on we listed them here in the in the
read the docs for instance through LF energy their ways I do have I think I
have two minutes so one thing I have on the very last slide before I close is
something we build in flex measures recently because if you talk about
projects like these basically after they happen and you just summarizing what
happened they don't really come alive because what actually happens and what
we do is that throughout the day new situations arise all the time you know
new circumstances like the car comes back it has a completely new state of
charge could be lower maybe they charged on the way is higher you don't know this
this is a new situation so we need to recompute and each of these situations
you also need to have a different set of forecasts so you ask yourself it's this
point in time I was asked to recompute and I look at the set of forecasts what
do I know now about the state of things so maybe not all the devices have sent
me everything yet there's always delays there's always lags in IOT applications
in the future which forecast do I have now available and that's what I mean
with it doesn't come alive right and we let's see if it works yeah we we made it
we made a UI that uses JavaScript so you can travel through time basically so
imagine that that bar is now you hit that button and we have kept the old
schedules we have kept everything that's all and we know when we knew it
that's how we can travel through time and when we stop it anywhere we know
what we knew at the time so let's say we knew the day ahead prices you can see
the day head price on top coming in in batches for instance and then the new
schedules that's a red dotted line also all right let me stop in time and there's
any questions all right there's a few but who decides on the order well let's
just start my left I think that V2d liberty oh yeah sure the question was
if this has been built for one car or if there's the opportunity to have multiple
cars at the same location on the charging station supported and V2d liberty
has right now been built for one household with one car which is expandable
in principle through some work and flex measures itself has a solver that could
also schedule multiple cars so that's not a technical problem on that side
so the question is that for the day head prices the energy suppliers make a
forecast usually or traditionally what all the consumers will consume aggregated
over thousands of consumers they get a nice curve and they try to buy that now
if the consumers react to that price you have a loop somehow a dynamics more
dynamic system and the question was if I have thought about it yes of course it's
super interesting there's two thoughts one is that there's now a couple of
providers like that in the Netherlands and I think they basically adjust for
that they would assume that a bunch of their customers do act flexible and
they might have have to add a model for that a behavioral model economics
economics behavioral and try to get it right on the other hand I think that some
there's going to be more energy suppliers because I know of a company
in the Netherlands that is basically helping larger companies become an
energy supplier so they don't if it's basically energy supply as a service so
you can brand your own energy supply contract and some of organizations I've
talked to think about adjusting their their price signal themselves so they
buy something on the day head market but that's not the price they give to you
they give you a different profile to try to sort that out
yeah could be could be that you're not doing as much money on the market but
now you add services I was talking about hardware so can you repeat the
question do you mean the Everest project yes well we are both in Linux
energy foundation so we know about each other so that would be a way out the
question right it's everything's super new and the question was for the
audience online that there's the Everest project and they also have open source
hardware although that's not there the core of the the company but they offer
that and they had a great talk this morning so that could help of course so
that's it's a great opportunity for the community for anybody maybe for us to
combine these two I don't know but especially young companies have to
sprint it's difficult I want to also get some part of the we are fine I'll be
answering questions in the chat if there's something burning or right now in
person afterwards in the break thank you