All about Energy Transition

As a Virtual Power Plant, Next Kraftwerke aggregates electricity producers and storage units in order to trade their energy on various markets. A business model that is fundamentally based on digital technology and that offers many exciting projects for IT specialists. In this interview, we introduce you to the two software developers Lydia Lerche and Christian Heiden from the software engineering team, who talk about their work in frontend and backend development. 

For decades, the discourse around the energy transition was characterised by a simple "it can't be done". Those who - like us - formulated the goal of wanting to convert the entire energy landscape to renewable energies at conferences 10 years ago earned at best a weary smile. Today, the matter is no longer a question of "if", but only of "how" and above all "when". The technical possibilities are there - as is a social and industry-wide consensus on where the journey must go. For not only the advancing climate change, but also the energy crisis has shown us how problematic the dependence on fossil energy really is.

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.

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?

Everyone is talking about the transformation of the energy system. But what exactly does this transformation involve?

The carbon bubble, also called CO2 bubble, is a theory that has its origin in climate and economic research. The term describes a possible overrating of companies that could only maintain their growth forecasts for the next few years by consuming fossil fuels on a scale that would violate the two-degree limit of the Copenhagen Treaty.

Clean Energy Wire interviewed our co-founder and CEO Hendrik Sämisch on milestones for the company and the energy transition.

A distributed energy resources management system (DERMS) is a platform which helps mostly distribution system operators (DSO) manage their grids that are mainly based on distributed energy resources (DER). By lack of a common definition, a DERMS thus – depending on your point of view – is something similar or even identical with a Virtual Power Plant (VPP). 

On some key aspects, people seem to agree: DERMS is a software platform that is used to organize the operation of the aggregated DER within a power grid. The usual DERMS application is found at the distribution grid level. DERMS typically require a more full-fledged integration of various other systems such as a distribution management system (DSM) for integrating it with a utility. Furthermore, an outage management system (OMS) or a supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system is usually needed to provide all DERMS functionality.

In the German language, there is a word that refers to the fear of having inadequate sunshine or wind to maintain a viable supply of renewable energy: dunkelflaute. The dramatic connotation of the word may be lost a bit in translation, but essentially, dunkelflaute means “a dark lull”.