Opinion Exchange

After two years of development, in August 2020, Next Kraftwerke and Jedlix started offering secondary reserve power (aFRR) to the Dutch grid using a pool of electric vehicles (EVs). Nick Hubbers, Jedlix, and Elias De Keyser, Next Kraftwerke, talk about their ambitions, how they realized this project, and what they learned along the way on using electric vehicles to balance the grid. Fasten your seat belts and keep reading!

On Friday 14 Aug, an extremely hot and dry day in California and the west, California’s independent system operator (CAISO) had to resort to limited rolling blackouts that affected approximately 400,000 customers in California on Friday and the following Saturday 15 Aug.

On June 22 of 2020, Poland came very close to a countrywide power outage: Power plants with a capacity of thirteen gigawatts (out of which, only six planned) went down – and subsequently, balancing energy prices rose to record level.

In a Virtual Power Plant, thousands of systems provide balancing services every day. But how exactly are the individual units selected for the provision of balancing energy? Which factors are taken into consideration?

Anyone who wants to aggregate decentralized plants in a Virtual Power Plant is confronted with a whole range of questions during the planning phase: Which business cases are feasible in the regulatory context of my country – and which ones make economic sense in this market environment? How can I connect the technical units in my Virtual Power Plant and which solutions meet the technical requirements of the grid operator? We compiled the top 10 questions each aggregator-to-be need to find an answer for.

Since the beginning of the corona crisis, negative power prices have become quite common for electricity traders: In this blog, we explain how negative electricity prices develop and what is positive about them.

The opinion persists that too many renewable energies in the energy mix would endanger the security of supply. Although there are currently still challenges that renewables cannot (yet) solve entirely on their own – keyword dark doldrums – the trend of the last few years shows that the security of supply in Germany has not declined, despite an increasing share of distributed renewable and volatile electricity producers. On the contrary, it has even increased. The Federal Network Agency publishes the SAIDI, which is the System Average Interruption Duration Index that documents the energy supply disruptions of a year and in which the cause of these disruptions is also identified – showing the increase in security of supply despite a simultaneous increase in renewable energies.

The COVID-19 pandemic shakes up the world – but the power grid in Europe remains stable. What ensures this stability and how do the electricity markets in Germany and Europe react to the situation?

For weeks now, Germany and its European neighbors have had a peak season for wind power. The winter storms Sabine (also known as Ciara or Elsa), Victoria (known as Dennis in UK) and Yulia brought new records – most recently the unprecedented peak value of 46.2 gigawatts (GW). Renewables accounted for 69 percent of net electricity production in the third week of February, with wind accounting for 55 percent. Never before has so much wind power been fed into the German power grid. Are these figures the result of extreme weather conditions, which simply brought us an extraordinary number of storms this winter, or is there a general trend here? And how does the German energy system actually cope with these record values?

For a couple of years now, the role of the Virtual Power Plant has been established in the energy industry. Today, it is pretty clear what a Virtual Power Plant is and why it makes sense to network, forecast, optimize, and dispatch a fleet of coordinated distributed energy resources (DER) such as wind, solar, bioenergy, hydropower, batteries, electrolyzers, and many more. But how do you make money with a Virtual Power Plant? What’s the business case of a VPP operator, or to use a synonym, of an aggregator?