All about Virtual Power Plant

Wed., April 29 2020, 9:30 a.m. (UTC+2)

Higher shares of renewables in electricity mix require perfect coordination of their energy generation to provide a cost-efficient and secure electricity supply and guarantee a stable grid. Virtual Power Plants (VPPs) allow to aggregate thousands of electricity producers, consumers and storage units and to control them according to signals from the wholesale market and system operators. 

Tue., April 21 2020, 3:30 p.m. (UTC+2)

Virtual Power Plants aggregate distributed energy resources (DER) in almost all parts of the world. However, they take different forms depending on the market environment and addresses different challenges of the transitioning energy industry. The webinar presents different Business Models renewable energy companies can adopt and shows how the same technology fundamentals can deliver different value propositions for different types of assets and market actors.

Wed., May 26 2021, 1 p.m. (CET)

In Greece, the role of the RES Aggregator (FoSe) has been recently established, which will take over the trading of RES in the future. Therefore, Next Kraftwerke, one of the largest Aggregators in Europe, brings together experts from Greek utilities, aggregators and institutions to discuss opportunities and challenges for the Greek RES aggregator market in a webinar format. 

Hendrik Sämisch and Jochen Schwill, founders and CEOs of Next Kraftwerke, on the partnership with Shell Renewables & Energy Solutions

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.

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.

In recent years, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has gained relevance in a wide variety of sectors. However, defining the term poses some difficulties. Central to Artificial Intelligence is that it makes and implements decisions based on data (information) independently with regard to the set goals. The term artificial distinguishes AI from the "natural intelligence" attributed to humans and animals. Narrower definitions see AI as a branch of computer science that deals with machine learning and the automation of intelligent behavior. Still, the definition of intelligence remains vague and excludes other areas of research, such as robotics or linguistics.

Jan de Decker, Paul Kreutzkamp and Elias de Keyser from Next Kraftwerke Belgium explain in this blog what lessons can be learnt from the roughly nine months of the mixed price system on the reserve power market in Germany.