An uncertainty-aware online planning algorithm for the sustainable electrification of festivals

Energy efficient festival electrification can be viewed as a middle-consumption problem, standing between smart household applications and larger commercial consumers. The optimal deployment of different resources, such as local renewable energy production (RES), diesel generators (DG) and energy storage systems (ESS) may bring about significant financial gain for the organizer, and is usually framed as an off-grid or limited grid-connection problem. This makes online planning particularly challenging due to the uncertainty related to the RES production, constraints regarding the operation of the diesel generators and limitations of the grid connection. In this paper a new online planning algorithm based on two-stage stochastic programming is proposed in order to address the aforementioned challenges and provide minimal-cost, uninterrupted, and sustainable electrification of festivals under dynamically priced grid energy. Data based on real festival events are used in order to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed methodology.