Alright, let's start then. Me and Tom here are, well, we've come here to tell you about
Shapeshifter, a project we've both been working on. For me it's been, I think the first time
I got in contact with it was five years ago, I think for Tom it's one or two. Well, this
is us. I work as a freelancer. I actually used to work at Alieander, where we just saw the
presentation from and I'm freelancing right now. Tom, just as me, is a member of the TSC,
the Technical Steering Committee of this project. We're here to tell you something about it.
That's some technical issues. This is not great. Anyway, the problem we're trying to,
I'm going to talk to you about the problem we're trying to solve. Yeah, what Shapeshifter is,
how does it work, and also how to use it. I do hope the screen will get back to us.
Right, so it's funny actually, part of the slide you saw just now. It's actually fun to see the
trend here because just two years ago we had some areas where there were issues with congestion on
our grid and right now it's almost impossible to get anything going. Yeah, really, to get your data
sender up or get your solar panels up. It's just almost impossible. Where the previous presentation
was about forecasting, we're actually on the other end of things with the trends that she talked
about, well, production and consumption is getting more simultaneous, it's getting less centralized,
a lot of electrification. This means we're slowly getting into issues. So how does it look like
if you draw it in a graph? This used to be our case. Well, quite simple. We expected use up until
the green line, capacity was black and actually the grid companies oversold their capacity a
little bit because, well, it's not usually used for the whole thing. Really annoying. Sorry for this.
Pull out the clicker, maybe that's the problem.
Yeah, it strangely shows up on the second screen there, but apparently the beamer's not very happy
with it. Alright, almost back. So it still wasn't that bad yet. I'm gonna stand on this side so I can
at least click on the laptop. At some point, it got so bad, our grid capacity is reached and well,
if this happens, two things might happen. Either your transformer is sort of overloaded, but it will
keep working. If you do it too often, what then happens is it will blow up or it will really
shorten its lifespan by a lot. So we try to prevent it from happening. As was, yeah, we can also
fix this problem by making sure it doesn't go over this peak anymore. How we do this, I'm just gonna
try and explain it without the screen. There's some major users on the net, let's say above 1 megawatt
for their connection, that actually have some influence on when their energy is used. So if they,
yeah, let's say a giant freezer or they've got a battery somewhere stored, to them it doesn't really
matter in case of the freezer, for example, the temperature needs to be between minus 25 and
minus 20. So this means that if you don't use power at the peak, you can make sure that it's fixed.
We're gonna try a different approach for the screen. Give them two minutes maybe.
So really any major company in the beginning, it used to be voluntary, but at some point,
yeah, problems are getting bigger and bigger. So we're getting into a state where it's actually
allowed by Dutch law to force certain companies to comply with these rules to make sure that
we're not having blackouts and that the grid is saved. We've got a second screen, we're back.
All right, thank you. It was kind of stressful. So actually the previous presentation, the open
step, this was really about creating insight. Where's your problem? When is your problem? How
big is your problem? That only, so the insight is just creating the graphs. You can identify
problems by having your experts at your company determine, okay, at which points, how much load
can our transformers handle? How much can our cables handle? So once you have that, you can,
okay, so these are risky areas because we see in our forecasts or in our measurements that we're
nearing our limits in certain cases. Third one is really an interesting one. You can choose a
solution because in the grids there's, well, not hundreds, but at least tens of possibilities to
alleviate the pressure on your grid. And shape shifter, which we're talking about here is one of
them, which is in the market based direction of solutions. Tom will tell a bit more about
the contents of shape shifter itself. Of course, you need to activate a solution once you've chosen
it. And last part is actually kind of interesting too. If companies are saying they've decreased
their use, how do you actually determine that that's true? Because usually power use is not
stable anyway. So how do you know they've kept their promises?
Well, that's where shape shifter comes in. You know, mind if I talk about this one. It was founded
in 2014, well, by a couple of grid operators, but also IT companies and consultants, because it was a
very common problem in Europe altogether, but it was started in the Netherlands because we've got a
very, very stable power grid and we like to keep it that way. So that's where the need came from.
It's actually put into practice by the Dutch DSOs. I worked on the first pilot project where we
actually made sure that we didn't have to put in a temporary cable, which would have cost 2 million
euros for just three years, because that was when the new transformer would have been in place.
So it was a very nice project to work on. The USEV standard, that's the Universal Smart Energy
Framework, has been updated a couple of times. In the meantime, it was relabeled to universal
flex trading protocol, but that conflicted with UFTP. FTP, that was kind of annoying. So it was
renamed to shape shifter and hopefully we'll keep it that way for a little bit. And I think now
it's Tom's turn to talk about what it does, or should I still take this one? I'll go into this
one again. So in the grid, there's a lot of roles defined and the Universal Smart Energy Framework
actually defines all these roles. The most important ones here for a shape shifter are the DSOs,
aggregators and prosumers. Aggregators are companies that usually provide some form of IT where they
can trade on behalf of companies, well, prosumers or consumers or companies that actually have the
physical flexibility, but the aggregator will be the party that's participating in the flex trading
protocol. It's possible that those two are the same. It's not necessary that roles are separated. It
might be that a prosumer actually takes on the aggregator role because they're big enough to just
be a party in this flex trading protocol. The DSOs and TSOs are the parties that really send out
the request, the flex request that Tom will probably talk about into the market. All the aggregators
will have time to respond to the request. Okay, apparently tomorrow at 6 p.m. until 7 p.m. there's
congestion on the production side. So please, if you can use extra power during that time in a
certain region, we will actually pay you for it. That's an example situation that you can handle
with shape shifter. So some typical flex applications. Solar parks talked about them, wind
parks, freezers. I think that's a very interesting one. I'm not even sure if it has been done before
to actually use a giant freezer as an energy storage for grid stabilization, so I thought it
was a very cool use case. Farms with solar, close to the solar parts, of course. Steel mills as they
are major energy users and not necessarily time specific in when they do so. And really, in most
of our early projects, we talked with greenhouses a lot because they have both large electricity
connections and gas connections. So they can switch really easily or can even provide power back to
the grid if they need to. So they are very nice from a flexibility perspective. Then I'll hand it over to
my colleague Tom. Yeah, so in the time remaining, the shape shifter project, it consists of a
specification which is published on GitHub. So you can scan the QR if you want. The specification is
the one hand of the project. The other part is the XML schemas which are defined along with it. We
are organized using a technical steering committee. We are part of the committee and also a couple of
members from the UK DSOs and also from the Dutch DSOs. There are also two shape shifter
implementations already. There is a Java library which is in use by Alieander and also at Gopax,
which is the congestion platform we are using in the Netherlands. And there is a Python implementation
which is used by another DSO. Everything is published under the Apache 2 license. We are
currently focusing on improving our processes, our quality control, etc., to meet the open SSF
best practices. And we are part of the LF Energy initiative. I will skip this for now. So we have
a couple of implementations already that are using shape shifter. There was a demonstration
project in the UK called Fusion. Good result from that. As I said, Gopax in the Netherlands. There
are also some congestion service providers which are also implementing shape shifter on their
end. So those are the CSP aggregator type of parties. And of course the grid operators
themselves are using it to facilitate trading of flexibility using shape shifter. Skip this for
now. Just one simple example of what the protocol looks like. It is an XML based protocol where the
DSO can indicate what flexibility is required on the prosumer side on which the prosumer can
reply with one or more offers that will be able to offer some flexibility to the grid operator.
And the grid operator can then in turn reply to this message and say, okay, I want to use your
flexibility during these hours to solve a specific congestion problem. One minute left.
Current challenges we have with the project. We are trying to get as much of the prosumers involved
as we can. So one of the challenges that we have to really keep a low entry barrier for these parties
to connect using shape shifter. So one of the things is security is of course a very important
topic. How can we keep it secure but also keep the barrier really low for entering into this type
of integrations. And the other thing is we need more contributors. So that's pretty much a story
for every open source project. But yeah, there are different ways you contribute. So if you find
this interesting, please take a look at our GitHub and see if you can improve one of these
items for example. Yeah, that's pretty much it.
Any questions? I see one in the back. Oh, there's no time. Sorry. Yeah, just come to the front
and then take your question.