All about Flexibility

Most complex software applications need some form of configuration, often through a configuration file. The more complicated the app, the more difficult become the choices between offering flexibility and improving usability. Configuration is the solution to get the best of both worlds. However, getting it right takes knowledge, experience and discipline and often requires having made all the usual mistakes yourself and learned from them. Now, our team of developers and data-analysts has published their solution to this problem as an open-source python library: PyConfig.

The automatic Frequency Restoration Reserve (aFRR), also known as secondary reserve, is a reserve in the power grid that helps to keep the grid frequency stable. To keep the frequency within certain thresholds, the Transmission System Operators (TSOs) activate balancing services like aFRR, which they acquire from Balancing Service Providers (BSPs). Countries differ in their specifications but after European harmonization of the balancing markets, BSPs need to ensure that they provide the reserve within 5 minutes (Full Activation Time). As the secondary reserve, aFRR replaces the FCR gradually after 30 seconds, the mFRR, the tertiary reserve, supports or partially substitutes the aFRR after 12.5 minutes.

We need more flexibility in the electricity grid, in the electricity market, in the entire electricity system. One can hear these demands repeatedly in connection with the energy transition. This is because an increase in the share of wind and solar in the electricity mix, which generate electricity in a volatile manner and can only be controlled to a limited extent, poses new challenges for the electricity grid.

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?

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

Our new series of blog posts covers power markets throughout the world. Our next stop is India – Ravi Vaidya is writing his master thesis on Non-European Flexibility Markets at Next Kraftwerke as part of our Innovation & Development team. Together with Jonas Simon, who has just been to India on a business trip, they discuss the Indian energy market.

Ecotricity from Great Britain is the first green electricity company providing green energy solutions since 1996. For their future projects, the Stroud based company turned to Next Kraftwerke for setting up a Virtual Power Plant based on its software-as-a-solution NEMOCS. We asked Mark Meyrick, Head of Trading and Smart Grids at Ecotricity, and Tobias Weghorn, NEMOCS product specialist at Next Kraftwerke, about the first steps in setting up a VPP of their own.

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”.

This interview with Jochen Schwill (CEO of Next Kraftwerke) was first published in The Beam #5. Jochen Schwill (CEO of Next Kraftwerke) talks about the fundamentals of a Virtual Power Plant and the idea behind it.

In our future energy systems we will pretty often see times where, let’s say, a sudden storm front brings heaps of cheap and green and beautiful but, alas, in that particular time unneeded wind power into the system. And we will see times where the opposite happens: a sudden shortage of wind and solar power. What can we do about it?