4Energy

Project description

Our project concerns the energy market and energy transition in the Netherlands. The research question we came up with is: “How can the energy transition in the context of energy storage imbalance, electricity mobility and energy management be improved while ensuring reliability and scalability?”. It all started with expert interviews and presentations, about the way it works, then we got to do brainstorming sessions to come up with concept. Later on, we created user stories and initial architecture of the software and after feedback from the stakeholders, we were able to create a plan for development over five sprints. We started steadily working on the technical part by creating scalable services, researching topics related to our project, looking into working with real data etc., while taking into consideration external factors such as GDPR and possible ethical issues.

Context

An electricity (market) system for a regional energy grid utility firm.
The system is suitable for an international market. The user can select between multiple languages and everything gets translated to the desired language.
A map is provided with up and down time of each energy producer in the grid and it provides information about the place, energy type, rated electrical power and build year.
Our system is interoperable with other utility companies' and the BRP's systems. We have a market page which allows you to sell to or buy energy from other grid providers.
Depending on the grid load our system can also sent customers a notification to advise them to either turn on or off their devices.

Results

With this project we learned more about enterprise software by keeping the non-functional requirements in mind such as scalability, security and performance in mind. We provided a unique solution to easy the burden on the energy grid by providing a notification system which gives the notifications such as right time to use the electricity.
We were also able to create a grid exchange which is can communicate and buy energy and sell energy to the other groups.

About the project group

Amount of time spent on the project: 0.5 year

Our project consists of seven members with different backgrounds and interests (Cyber Security, Smart Mobile etc.). We worked during the project in pretty structured way making use of the agile framework SCRUM with three-week sprints. We spent five study days every two weeks on the project (first week two days, second week three days) with every Monday stand-up meeting in the morning. Our communication was mainly in discord server, because usually we could not all be on site. We used Jira as a project management tool. At the end of each sprint, we had presentation, peer reviews and retrospective, which helped us to get better and better each sprint and optimize our process. Finally, it is good to mention that not only our technical knowledge improved, but also our professional skills.