Torben Bach Pedersen

The recent spread of distributed renewable energy sources and smart IoT devices offer new possibilities for the use of energy flexibility, the ability to shift energy use in time, amount, type and storage. This opens a new era of bottom-up cellular energy systems. In order to harness the full potential of flexibility, flexibility has to be modeled and represented in a standardized way that can be efficiently managed, manipulated, and traded on markets. This keynote provides a comprehensive overview of the award-winning FlexOffer concept, which offers a general, powerful and effective way of modeling and managing energy demand and supply flexibilities from a wide range of flexible resources and their aggregates. Basic concepts and the different phases of the FlexOffer life-cycle are defined, followed by advanced FlexOffer types and constraints as well as algorithms for FlexOffer generation, aggregation, disaggregation, and pricing that can significantly reduce energy management and trading complexities and increase overall efficiency. A general decentralized system architecture for trading FlexOffers in existing and emerging markets. Experimental results show that FlexOffers can capture all common energy loads, can (dis)aggregate millions of loads in seconds, scale to long time horizons, and be traded on common markets with high utility. FlexOffers are used in a number of commercial products and is currently being developed as an open standard for flexibility.