Data can help balance an electricity grid with more wind and solar energy

Article

Production and consumption in the electricity grid have to be held in balance, and this can be a challenge. With green energy sources, this balance will increasingly be maintained by adjusting the consumption side. This is only possible by systematically collecting and sharing data.

When we put a mobile phone in charge, or switch a light on, we expect the electric current to flow immediately. To the uninformed, electricity is an everyday utility we take for granted; a one-dimensional raw material. Electricity comes out of the socket and brings life to everything from lights to laptops.

However, if you look behind the socket and follow the cables back to the source, things are nowhere near that simple. At least not for those who are responsible. The electricity grid requires production and consumption to constantly remain equal to each other within a very narrow interval. Like a scales being held in balance. Otherwise there’ll be black-outs and power failures.

More renewable energy sources, such as the sun and wind in electricity production, and consumers who sometimes act unpredictably, mean that balancing the electricity system has become considerably more complex. In this context, data and data sharing are crucial tools to secure the electricity utility in an environment where high security of supply, a high share of green energy sources, efficiency and reasonable prices all have to fall into place. And much of this data has to come from the consumers themselves. Where it was previously possible to adjust production up and down to keep the system in balance, in the future it will also be necessary to adjust consumption as well.

It’s relatively easy to turn up production at traditional power plants, but this isn’t possible with wind and solar energy. Instead, we can adjust consumption. This could be in large office landscapes, processes in the utilities sector, shops, industrial processes, homes, charging stations for electric cars or in other places. Whether you increase production or reduce consumption, the net effect is the same, says Flemming Silius Nielsen, Head of Flex Partner at Andel Energy.

The energy company is building experience via its so-called Flex Platform, which the company has developed with IBM. Initially, a number of very large electricity customers in the Andel group, including Salling Group, the City of Copenhagen and most recently the Birn iron foundry, as well as other major industrial and telecommunications companies, are in partnerships to provide the flexible consumption to maintain the balance.

Like a Tetris game

Everything from refrigerators to keep food fresh in supermarkets, to heat pumps and ventilators to provide comfortable temperatures and fresh air in offices can be disconnected or turned on for short periods, without impairing either the food or comfort. By doing this, the partners can help secure balance in the electricity grid.

However, it’s not quite that simple. The different units – assets as Flemming Silius Nielsen calls them – behave differently. In the Flex Platform, you have to know the capacity and the length of time you can shut down the refrigerator in a supermarket or the heating in an office building.

We usually say this is like a Tetris game. We have a number of building blocks, i.e. the various elements that can be switched on or off. Some assets, such as batteries, can react very quickly, while this does not apply for heat pumps, for example. We need the building blocks to fit together, like in Tetris, he says.

So far, Andel only has large corporate customers on the Flex Platform. You need specific real-time data for the individual assets. In private homes, the challenge is to access relevant customers’ assets, such as heat pumps, electric heating, car charging stations, PV solar modules and batteries etc. in a reasonably cost-effective way, and there must always be power for the router that ensures the internet connection. Furthermore, it must all run digitally and in real time.

There are great potentials in private households, but it requires very different data solutions than we have today. Therefore, we’ve started with large corporate customers, says Flemming Silius Nielsen.

Flexible consumption supports the green electricity grid

He differentiates between what he calls private-economy optimisation on the one hand, i.e. that customers can choose to use electricity when the price is low, and flexible consumption on the other. Flexible consumption is an entirely new market in which customers are rewarded for enabling their electricity-consuming units to switch on and off when required to balance the electricity grid.

There are large economic and climate benefits. Much more renewable energy can be used in energy production, and there is much less need for thermal power plants, which burn coal, oil or biomass, as back-up to solar and wind.

The so-called frequency regulation, which is the market for services that can maintain balance in the electricity grid, is the final element in the enormous change that has occurred in the electricity system over the past 25 years.

Thirty years ago, local electricity companies supplied electricity and ran the local grids. Everyone paid on the basis of their consumption, typically every year or half-year.

With liberalisation of the market in Denmark around the turn of the millennium, first corporate customers and later private customers were released to choose their own electricity supplier. However, at first, for many years very few private customers exploited this possibility.

Things changed with the drastically increasing electricity and energy prices in the autumn of 2022, and it suddenly became popular for private consumers to optimise their energy consumption. Thousands of Danish households downloaded apps so they could monitor changes in electricity prices over the day. And everything from recharging electric cars to running dishwashers was moved to the night, when electricity was cheapest. At the peak, approximately 30% of electricity consumption was moved to times with cheap prices per kilowatt hour.

Aktive kudner giver nye udfordringer

It’s good that we can even out electricity consumption over the day, stresses Professor Flemming Nielsen Silius. Wind turbines can also produce electricity at night, and we better exploit both production capacity and investments in the transmission and distribution grids if consumption is spread more evenly over the day.

However, private-economy optimisation and increasingly price-conscious consumers have also brought new challenges to balancing the electricity grid.

Every day, players responsible for balancing the electricity sector and Energinet draw up detailed forecasts for future electricity consumption, in which the day is broken down into hourly and 15-minute intervals. On the basis of these forecasts, electricity producers adjust their production. But if, in the wake of the forecasts, consumers can check the time-based electricity prices, they will move their consumption. This disrupts the forecasts, because suddenly consumption is very different.

It’s a bit like traffic. If you have a detailed forecast of when the rush hour and congestion are expected, many drivers will decide to leave earlier or later than the peak rush hour. And this will shift the rush hour.

On the roads, you need patience and live with congestion. In the electricity system, however, imbalances and lack of capacity in periods with calm winds and fog can potentially cause black-outs, or slightly less dramatic brown-outs, in which players responsible for the electricity supply deliberately turn off the power in specific areas for a shorter period to keep the electricity grid running without a major power cut.

Data has to flow freely

Data is both the key and one of the major challenges in the design of the electricity system of the future in which customers’ flexible consumption helps to maintain balance in the grid.

Today, energy companies’ knowledge stops at the main meter. Behind the meter, the calm of private life prevails. Or perhaps rather calm for the private suppliers.

Large modern buildings usually have a Building Management System (BMS) with data on heating, ventilation and so on. Flex Platform is designed to communicate with by far the majority of the larger BMSs. This provides access to the underlying assets.

Digital access to the underlying assets is more difficult in buildings without an updated BMS, special processes in industry, small industrial companies and at private customers, and it often requires specially designed IoT solutions.

There will be a need for far more data, and this must flow freely. This applies for both the consumption side, and for the electricity system itself, which has to know the load on transformer stations because these can also be bottlenecks in the system, says Senior Research and Innovation Manager Lea Schick from the Alexandra Institute.

Lea Schick has worked for several years on projects on data in the electricity sector.

With respect to electricity consumption, data has already been collected in Energinet’s data hub. However, this is not the real-time data that will be required for a market for flexibility to work properly.

It will also be logical to collect data from other utilities. Production at CHP plants, and large pumps at wastewater treatment plants and in the water supply system can also be turned on and off, explains Lea Schick, who quickly adds that there are new challenges in this context too.

There are very large amounts of data, but for obvious security reasons, we can’t have it all on one server or in a large datapark. If the Russians or others with malevolent intention find out, it would be an obvious target. Therefore, it is crucial to store the data in decentralised locations, she says.

Consumers are not rational

Lea Schick points to data spaces as the future solution. Both in terms of legislation and technically, there are still many challenges to resolve. Data spaces are basically a system that can provide relevant players with access to relevant data.

At the moment, a lot of work is going on in the EU to pave the way for an organisational and digital infrastructure in which it is easier to share data, while keeping it decentralised. The individual undertaking or consumer will still have to authorise data sharing. However, it should be easier, so you don’t need separate agreements for all the power-consuming units connected to Andel’s Flex Platform, for example, or similar initiatives.

The EU is working on both legislation and technological development, and there are large subsidy funds to develop the basic structure for common European data spaces. There are very similar issues across sectors. There is a need for data spaces in the energy sector, in healthcare and in transport and mobility, just to mention some examples of the sector-specific data spaces being worked on at European level. It’s a question of the technical set-up, security and the governance structure, and not least who is to have ownership of the data, says Lea Schick.

She points to several challenges. The technology and the amount of data need to be further developed to establish a more flexible electricity system. And there are challenges in conventional thinking. Both in those who make the systems and in the customers themselves.

There’s a huge potential in ordinary households. But getting customers to understand why they have to agree to help is a daunting task, says Lea Schick.

The change is in line with the radical changes brought about by the internet when it shifted from just being a tool reserved for researchers to being a communications motorway for the general public. We have understand customers more deeply.

The energy system has been developed by what research calls ”the rational resource man” – white, middle-aged men with an engineering background. The problem is that many don’t behave with the same rationale as the developers require. It may well be that you can save money by washing clothes at night and hanging them out to dry in the morning. But if you have three children, and their football kit has to be clean for the next game, you’ll run your washing and tumble dryer at other times, says Lea Schick.

There are several changes to be addressed in the massive transition of energy systems, she points out.

We have to develop new digital systems, and secure more, and more secure, exchange of data. This requires insight into consumers’ habits in their use of energy, and not least fundamental acceptance from consumers. All these parameters must be in place if we are to exploit the full potential in flexible consumption, says Lea Schick.