Music festivals such as Roskilde festival require installing a short term electric grid. The consumers which include food stalls and small marketplaces often have a very limited knowledge about their power consumption. Therefore, electricity is bought in greater quantities than needed, and a lot of power and money is wasted.
This project involves the construction of cheap, small and accurate energy meters that measure current, voltage and power. The energy meters can be implemented at any event with the purpose of monitoring and mapping the power consumption. The device is a stand-alone unit, and the information is sent to a central processing unit, where the data can be analyzed. The goal is simply to gather information about changes in the electric grids (in real time), and by doing this a lot of knowledge is now present and ready to be interpreted.
Question that would be answered would be of the category:
- How much electricity did we use on specific occasions? (Busy or less busy times)
- When is it ideal to use less power for refrigerators or ovens? (After analyzation)
- How much electricity should we buy for next year?
Being able to measure at certain points and mapping this data into a chart in real time, has a great potential for “grid balancing”. Being able to estimate the power consumption beforehand will prevent a situation where too much electricity is bought.
Our product is specified to measure up to 16 ampere of current and is therefore limited to smaller shops. Nevertheless, the project is scalable and we could easily measure higher currents. So in coming years the energy meters could function as consumption references, and support potential vehicle to grid connections and wind turbines.
Contact info@roskilde.dtu.dk if you want to hear more!