Wolfgang Ketter

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Professor Wolf Ketter delivering 'Sustainable Energy - without Fear' at the TedXRotterdam 2017 event. Professor Wolf Ketter speaking at the TedX Rotterdam event November 20, 2017.jpg
Professor Wolf Ketter delivering 'Sustainable Energy - without Fear' at the TedXRotterdam 2017 event.

Wolfgang Ketter (born Traben-Trarbach, Germany, 1972) is Chaired Professor of Information Systems for a Sustainable Society at the University of Cologne. [1] and a prominent scientist in the application of artificial intelligence, machine learning and intelligent agents in the design of smart markets, including demand response mechanisms and in particular automated auctions. He is a co-founder of the open energy system platform Power TAC, an automated retail electricity trading platform that simulates the performance of retail markets in an increasingly prosumer- and renewable-energy-influenced electricity landscape.

Contents

Career

Advisory roles

Ketter is an advisor on the energy transition to the German government, by virtue of the affiliation of the Institute of Energy Economics with, in particular, the energy-intensive German state of North Rhine-Westphalia. He is also a fellow of the World Economic Forum and member of the WEF Global Council on Future Mobility [2] and the Global New Mobility Coalition, contributing on the use of AI and machine learning to address issues arising from growth in electrification of energy such as the use of batteries as virtual power plants, [3] the management of electric vehicle charging to prevent grid congestion, or the potential for peer-to-peer electricity trading.

Ketter has also been an advisor for over a decade to the Port of Rotterdam on the design of energy cooperatives and energy trading platforms as well as one of the largest auction companies in the world, Royal FloraHolland, where his initial research led to a redesign of auction mechanisms [4] and decision support systems. [5] The cumulative research project team received the Association for Information Systems Impact Award in 2020 [6]

Research

Ketter’s research is multidisciplinary, addressing the overlap of AI and ML in the economics of retail energy and mobility markets. The industry and policy applications of his research interconnect in large-scale projects such as the EU Smart city development project Ruggedised, for which the Erasmus University-based team's publication on the optimization of the City of Rotterdam's electric transit bus network was recognized with the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences Daniel H. Wagner runner-up award. [7]

His research focuses on the use of competitive benchmarking and intelligent agents in virtual world simulations of retail energy markets as part of a smart grid. A small-scale version of the Power TAC project led to a publication on demand side management, 'A simulation of household behavior under variable prices' [8] that has several hundred citations in publications representing a variety of scientific disciplines. Two of his publications [9] [10] in the Management Information Systems Quarterly journal and one in Energy Economics [11] form the foundation for the current Power TAC platform.

In 2016 [12] and 2019 [13] he was Chair of the Workshop on Information Technologies and Systems.

Ketter is Director of the Institute of Energy Economics at the University of Cologne, where he is a chaired Professor of Information Systems for a Sustainable Society. At the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University, he is Professor of Next Generation Information Systems as well as Director of the Erasmus Centre for Future Energy Business and Academic Director of Smart Cities and Smart Energy at the Erasmus Centre of Data Analytics. He has been a visiting professor at the Haas School of Business and Berkeley Institute of Data Science, University of California at Berkeley in 2016 to 2017.

Related Research Articles

École centrale de Nantes

École Centrale de Nantes, or Centrale Nantes, is a grande école - a French engineering school - established in 1919 under the name of Institut Polytechnique de l'Ouest. It delivers Graduate, Master, and PhD Programmes based on the latest scientific and technological developments and the best management practices.

In economic terms, electricity is a commodity capable of being bought, sold, and traded. An electricity market, also power exchange or PX, is a system enabling purchases, through bids to buy; sales, through offers to sell. Bids and offers use supply and demand principles to set the price. Long-term contracts are similar to power purchase agreements and generally considered private bi-lateral transactions between counterparties.

Distributed generation, also distributed energy, on-site generation (OSG), or district/decentralized energy, is electrical generation and storage performed by a variety of small, grid-connected or distribution system-connected devices referred to as distributed energy resources (DER).

Energy demand management, also known as demand-side management (DSM) or demand-side response (DSR), is the modification of consumer demand for energy through various methods such as financial incentives and behavioral change through education.

Demand response Techniques used to prevent power networks from being overwhelmed

Demand response is a change in the power consumption of an electric utility customer to better match the demand for power with the supply. Until recently electric energy could not be easily stored, so utilities have traditionally matched demand and supply by throttling the production rate of their power plants, taking generating units on or off line, or importing power from other utilities. There are limits to what can be achieved on the supply side, because some generating units can take a long time to come up to full power, some units may be very expensive to operate, and demand can at times be greater than the capacity of all the available power plants put together. Demand response seeks to adjust the demand for power instead of adjusting the supply.

Smart meter Online recorder of utility usage

A smart meter is an electronic device that records information such as consumption of electric energy, voltage levels, current, and power factor. Smart meters communicate the information to the consumer for greater clarity of consumption behavior, and electricity suppliers for system monitoring and customer billing. Smart meters typically record energy near real-time, and report regularly, short intervals throughout the day. Smart meters enable two-way communication between the meter and the central system. Such an advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) differs from automatic meter reading (AMR) in that it enables two-way communication between the meter and the supplier. Communications from the meter to the network may be wireless, or via fixed wired connections such as power line carrier (PLC). Wireless communication options in common use include cellular communications, Wi-Fi, wireless ad hoc networks over Wi-Fi, wireless mesh networks, low power long-range wireless (LoRa), Wize ZigBee, and Wi-SUN.

A virtual power plant (VPP) is a cloud-based distributed power plant that aggregates the capacities of heterogeneous distributed energy resources (DER) for the purposes of enhancing power generation, as well as trading or selling power on the electricity market. Examples of virtual power plants exist in the United States, Europe, and Australia.

Smart grid Type of electrical grid

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Electrical grid Interconnected network for delivering electricity from suppliers to consumers

An electrical grid is an interconnected network for electricity delivery from producers to consumers. Electrical grids vary in size and can cover whole countries or continents. It consists of:

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Open energy system models are energy system models that are open source. However, some of them may use third party proprietary software as part of their workflows to input, process, or output data. Preferably, these models use open data, which facilitates open science.

Geoffrey G. Parker

Geoffrey G Parker is a scholar whose work focuses on distributed innovation, energy markets, and the economics of information. He co-developed the theory of two-sided markets with Marshall Van Alstyne.

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C. Göran Andersson Swedish academic

Claes Göran Andersson, is a Swedish academic. He was a full Professor of Power Systems in the Department of Information Technology, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland, in 2010–2016 and is now emeritus. He is a Fellow of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences, Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, and the Swiss Academy of Engineering Sciences. He was also elected as an International Member of the US National Academy of Engineering in 2016 for contributions to the development of high-voltage direct current (HVDC) technology and methods of power system voltage stability analysis.

Peter Cramton

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References

  1. "Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Ketter". EWI.
  2. Forum, World Economic. "An Open Letter To C40 Mayors: How Road Pricing Can Change Your Cities". Forbes.
  3. Discovery, R. S. M. "The Clean Energy Future Is Coming, And It's Coming In A Car That Drives Itself". Forbes.
  4. "iFlow, to improve the floriculture sector with AI and make it more sustainable". YouTube.
  5. Schuetze, Christopher F. (December 16, 2014). "Dutch Flower Auction, Long Industry's Heart, Is Facing Competition" via NYTimes.com.
  6. "AIS Impact Award". Association for Information Systems.
  7. "INFORMS Press Release". Informs.org.
  8. "Google Scholar". scholar.google.nl.
  9. "MIS Quarterly". misq.org.
  10. "MIS Quarterly". misq.org.
  11. Ketter, Wolfgang; Collins, John; Reddy, Prashant (September 1, 2013). "Power TAC: A competitive economic simulation of the smart grid". Energy Economics. 39: 262–270. doi:10.1016/j.eneco.2013.04.015.
  12. "WITS2016".
  13. "WITS2019 People".