*2.1. Medium-Voltage Grid*

The original medium-voltage grid for the city of Leoben within the framework of the Austrian research funding agency (FFG) projects "Smart Exergy Leoben" [17] and "Move2Grid" [18] has been anonymised and made available by the local grid operator Energienetze Steiermark GmbH, in compliance with the data protection regulations. The data was provided in the form of a detailed database of the electrical equipment for the year 2014 and a power grid plan in the commercially available software NEPLAN 5.5.6 [19]. The software NEPLAN is a high-end power system analysis tool for electricity, gas, water, and district heating networks. It is used in transmission, distribution, generation, industry, renewable energy systems and smart grid applications. The medium-voltage grid of the city of Leoben consists of a 5 kV and a 30 kV voltage level. While the 30 kV voltage level is designed as a ring topology, the 5 kV voltage level is split into a mesh topology in the inner-city area and into stub lines in rural areas. The database contains, for example, the annual energy consumption of the 194 grid stations, which represent about 16000 customers with an annual energy consumption of ~181 GWh, in an anonymous form. Each grid station contains the number of customers and the corresponding annual energy consumption or production for all standard load profiles according to the "Federal Association of the German Energy and Water Industry" (BDEW) [20] and the synthetic load profiles from the Austrian regulation agency (e-control) [21]. These profiles are normalised to a consumption/production of 1000 kWh per year and are given as 15-minute average power values over a day. Based on these annual energy consumptions, annual load and production profiles are modelled as described in Section 3.2. A hydroelectric power plant (10 MW), a biomass cogeneration plant (0.5 MW) and eight small PV plants feed into the medium-voltage grid. In addition, the database provides all technical data and the geographical location of the local grid transformers and the electrical equipment (transformers, lines, grid nodes, busbars, etc.). To ensure the allocation of the equipment to the energy cells in the context of the development of the simplified cell-based grid model, the geographic coordinates are visualised using a geographic information software system (GIS), QGIS [22]. Due to data protection guidelines, we cannot provide this original data. However, this has no negative influence on the general statement of this work.
