All about Utility

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.

The term ‘dispatch’ refers to resource planning at a power plant by the plant’s operator. ’Redispatch’ refers to a short-term change in how a power plant is utilized. This request comes at the behest of a transmission system operator to prevent bottlenecks in the grid.

It is well-know that household alternating current (AC) in Germany and Europe has a frequency of 50 Hertz (Hz), while other parts of the world run on 60 Hz. What is less known is that this utility frequency (also known as mains frequency or grid frequency) also provides information about the ratio of electricity generation to electricity consumption in a power grid. If the frequency drops too low, there is not enough electricity in the grid; if the frequency increases too much, there is too much electricity in the grid. An intelligent supply-demand mechanism and a functional system for ancillary services to compensate for frequency deviation is necessary to keep the utility frequency at a stable 50 or 60 Hz.

Winter storm Axel, which set the current wind energy record in Germany, was also the source of a large wind power excess in Germany – and a considerable amount of hydrogen gas for the municipal utility company in the town of Hassfurt. There, the power-to-gas (PtG) installation, owned jointly by the city utility and Greenpeace Energy, stored the excess and particularly cheap wind energy in a matter of seconds as hydrogen wind gas.

In Germany, a lot has been written about two energy megatrends of our time, liberalisation of energy markets and decentralisation of the energy landscape. What we think has been neglected is a third megatrend: digitalisation.