ZEL Request Partitioning

High Level Concept: ZEL Request

A ZEL Request refers to a "Zero Export Limit" request. This request is made by generators or dispatchable assets to set their output to zero, often indicating that they are not able to inject power into the grid for a specific reason.

ZEL Requests can be relevant in several scenarios, such as:

1. Maintenance: When maintenance is being conducted on a generator, it may need to curtail its output temporarily.

2. Technical Issues: If there are technical problems that prevent a generator from operating safely or effectively, a ZEL Request signals that they will not produce energy.

3. Market Conditions: During high levels of generation leading to potential oversupply in the grid, generators might reduce output to maintain stability.

Market operators use these requests to manage the overall balance of the electricity supply and demand, ensuring system security and reliability.

The process starts when a retailer sends their ZEL request which needs to be partitioned accordingly, and forwarded to their respective aggregators. The partitioning process needs to take place in a fully trust-less and secured environment where data are pseudo-anonymized to protect aggregators' business interests.

ZEL Request Partitioniong Solution

Actual Node Red flow of ZEL Request Partitioning solution

The ZEL Request Partitioning solution aims to test the above business case. Below are the steps which constitute its solution flow:

1. Fetch ZEL request from the request sender every 30 minutes

2. Parse the request into JSON Object

3. Fetch NMI to aggregator mapping from the NMI Registry. The NMI Registry is a backend API service which simply contains the mapping between NMI and aggregator.
4. Partition the ZEL request according to the aggregator using the NMI to aggregator mapping

5. Generate the Merkle Tree root hash of the partitioned data
6. Submit the root hash to EWX as a vote by initiating the EWX Marketplace App Integration node