All about Forecasting

November 2, 2020 | 12 p.m. (CET)

Forecasting the feed-in of volatile energy sources as accurately as possible is one of the fundamental challenges for a successful energy transition. Martin Linden (Analyst) explains the background and ingredients for a precise PV forecast. Aleksandra Radwanska (International Business Development Manager Manager) will lead through this webinar as moderator.

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?

Venturing into a green energy landscape – especially in countries with no established subsidy schemes for renewables – is a huge undertaking, but also leaves a lot of room for establishing new approaches. South Korea is a country that is still in its first steps of establishing a decentralized green energy industry. Haezoom is a start-up from South Korea that specializes in solar power production. Together with Next Kraftwerke, the Seoul-based company sets out to explore the possibilities of utilizing a VPP. We talked with J-Ho Lee, Product Owner (PO) from Haezoom, and Felix Jedamzik, Key Account Manager NEMOCS at Next Kraftwerke.

Good solar forecasts create significant added value. They optimize sales for photovoltaic assets, which leads to lower balancing and control reserve costs. Complicated algorithms working in the background ensure that the forecasts are as accurate as possible. They process large volumes of data from multiple sources so traders are well-positioned on the market.

In the energy industry, peak shaving refers to leveling out peaks in electricity use by industrial and commercial power consumers. Power consumption peaks are important in terms of grid stability, but they also affect power procurement costs: In many countries, electricity prices for large-scale consumers are set with reference to their maximum peak-load. The reason is simple: the grid load and the necessary amount of power production need to be designed to accommodate these peak loads.

On the energy market, the balancing group (also known as the balancing authority) accounts for all power produced and/or consumed by a collection of assets within the group. Accounting for the group’s net production or consumption serves as an instrument for providing a particular operating region the precise amount of power it needs. The group manages the balancing act between power feed-in and off-take. This is designed to avoid over- and underproduction as much as possible by efficiently utilizing the power grid with minimal frequency fluctuations. Ultimately, the goal is to simultaneously match the amount of power consumed and produced within the grid.