The Idea
The LLEC - Living laboratory for a sustainable energy system
In the light of growing shares of highly fluctuating energy sources such as wind and solar energy as well as the increasing electrification of our everyday life, new challenges arise with regard to the disign of future energy systems. Such an energy system will increasingly consist of smaller, decentralized energy plants in the kilowatt or megawatt range. In such a system, "consumers" will become so-called "prosumers" (a combination of "producer" and "consumer"). This means that individual plants within the energy system temporarily produce energy and temporarily consume energy. As a result, energy flows are much more complicated, and technical solutions are needed to store energy in order to compensate for short-term, medium-term or even seasonal differences between the production and consumption of energy. As a result, the necessity of storing energy leads to energetic conversion losses, which can be minimized by so-called sector coupling - the close linking of different energy forms and the respective plants. In the Living Lab Energy Campus (LLEC), we take this into account by optimally combining the sectors heat, electricity and chemical energy storage through adaptive and predictive control strategies.
Forschungszentrum Jülich has been developing scientific and technical solutions in the field of energy research for many years. With the LLEC, founded in 2018, a living laboratory is currently being created to test the prerequisites of an energy system transformation on our own campus under real conditions. The property of Forschungszentrum Jülich offers ideal conditions for becoming one of the world's leading development platforms for a decentrally organized and regeneratively oriented energy supply system. This is made possible by its leading global position in the field of alternative energy generation technologies, for example in the area of photovoltaics and the electrochemical energy storage of hydrogen. But also the expertise in the operation of large-scale plants for meanwhile more than 7,000 employees favors the project to a large extent. Due to the building structure as a self-contained property, the already existing network infrastructures as well as the diverse consumers on the campus, all scenarios of a future urban energy supply system can be mapped.
To this end, more than ten different institutes and organizational units are working closely together in a new interdisciplinary way, thus making a significant contribution to the societal challenges of future energy systems.