Related Projects
Commercial Platforms - DER Market Platforms
Whilst there are hundreds of DERMS and VPP aggregator platforms in the market today, Digital Infrastructure for DER Markets represent an intermediary, exchange or marketplace, and do not have business models with financial interest in either side of trades.
In theory, each of these platforms should make it easier for DER load and generation aggregators to access markets, and to transact the value of DER into the broader bulk supply power systems.
deX: GreenSync
The Decentralised Energy Exchange (deX) is centralised digital platform that enables electricity grids to support more renewables, handling the growing increase in rooftop solar, electric vehicles and other distributed energy resources (DER). Whilst its initial focus was broadly across markets, networks and DER connectivity, today it’s focus is almost solely around solar inverters and avoidance of minimum demand.
Data Hub: Energy Web Foundation
The Data Hub is a message sharing solution that streamlines communications and data processing between organisations. It is a blend of both traditional message broker functionality with SSO authentication and authorisiation environment, and a blockchain based worker arrangement for shared compute resources.
Piclo Flex: Piclo
Piclo Flex is a marketplace that supports SOs in the end-to-end process of procuring and operating flexibility. Their core market has been for the management of procurement tenders for flex services for distribution businesses from small to medium scale DERs. High coverage in UK, and expanding into selected regions of Europe and US.
Local Electricity Market: EPEX Spot
EPEX SPOT is one of two independent spot markets for UK European energy trading. The LEM platform has been built specifically for use cases related to flexibility procurement and congestion management. It offers an end-to-end process for System Operators, covering functionalities across the full value chain of flexibility procurement. Used a selected regions across UK and Europe.
NODES: Agder Energi AG
Nodes is a Scandanavian based independent marketplace for a sustainable energy future where grid owners, producers and consumers of energy can trade decentralised flexibility and energy. Initially a collaboration from Nordpool and Norwegian energy utilities, it is a now an independent operator offering network flexibility services for commercial scale DER.
Leap Platform: Leap Energy
Leap is a platform to Connects distributed energy resources to wholesale energy markets via a Cloud platform and to earn money when participating in dispatch. Its core proposition provides automation interfaces into energy markets across the US ISOs to enrol, and offers webhook integrations to dispatch and settle trades in multiple energy markets.
Demonstration / pilot projects
Demonstration projects
Whilst there is no one project that has tackled the breadth and depth of the issue, there have been perhaps billions of dollars spent on pilots around the world to assess the feasibility of platforms and systems that can address these integration challenges.
Australia and New Zealand
1. Project EDGE (Energy Demand and Generation Exchange) is a multi- year project to demonstrate an off-market, proof-of-concept Distributed Energy Resource (DER) Marketplace that efficiently operates DER to provide both wholesale and local network services within the constraints of a specific area of the power distribution grid.
2. Project Converge aims to demonstrate new distributed energy resources (DER) orchestration capabilities known as ‘shaped operating envelopes’ which will allow energy distributors such as Evoenergy to improve network congestion management, minimise network expenditure and improve DER market bidding into energy and ancillary service markets.
3. Project Symphony is an innovative pilot project designed to ‘orchestrate’ approximately 900 DER assets across 500 homes and businesses in the Southern River area s of Atwell, Harrisdale and Piara Waters into a Virtual Power Plant.
4. Project Edith is an initiative that aims to showcase how the grid can facilitate technology and green energy solutions (like Virtual Power Plants (VPPs)) to participate in energy markets while staying within distribution network capacity limits.
5. SAPN flexible exports is an option that SAPN have been developing to allow smart solar systems to respond to times when the network is congested, while enabling greater export limits the rest of the time. It will become compulsary to use flexible exports from July 2023 if customers wish to export energy back into the grid.
6. Evo DER Integration and Automationproject aimed to investigate and test options for how DER can effectively integrate into our energy system and how they can be used by customers to their full potential, via a Distributed Energy Marketplace using a Distributed Energy Resources Management System (DERMS) model for technical validation.
7. Western Australia emergency solar management Emergency Solar Management is the capability to remotely reduce the generation from small-scale distributed rooftop solar PV systems as a last resort measure, assisting the Australian Energy Market Operator to protect the power system during extreme low load events. The Western Australia Government is introducing a requirement for new and upgraded rooftop solar systems with an inverter capacity of 5kW or less to be capable of being remotely managed, so they can be called on during an Emergency Solar Management event.
Uk and Europe
1. Cornwall Local Energy Market (LEM). The LEM programme, part funded by the European Regional Development Fund, and delivered by Centrica Business Solutions, has been operating since 2017, and has seen solar and battery systems installed into 100 homes across Cornwall.
2. Local Energy Oxfordshire (LEO) is to develop a local electricity market for Oxfordshire, that supplies its own needs, ensures reliable grid operation, and rewards generators a storage for the energy and flexibility they provide.
3. UKPN flexibility hub is for participating homes and businesses to earn payments, while saving costs for everyone and helping more low-carbon technologies to connect to the network.
4. Electron Orkney is the first Electron-operated market, which functions as a real-time distribution-level marketplace. Electron’s market platform connects renewable generators, subject to curtailment, to flexible, local energy assets able to absorb excess power.
5. Enera Project is a pilot project conducted by EWE and EPEX SPOT between 2017 and 2020. The Enera project created a marketplace where flexibility demand from system operators could meet flexibility supply from different technologies, such as batteries, virtual power plants, renewables and industrial loads.
6. PowerMatcher / EF-PIPowerMatcher is a transactive energy smart grid coordination mechanism that was piloted in Europe with several utilities as part of an open source Project. It works together with the Energy Flexibility Platform & Interface, EF-Pi in short, is a platform which enables appliances, the smart grid and smart services to communicate with each other.
US and Canada
1. GridExchange: Alectra Energy consumers are increasingly adopting distributed energy resources (DERs) - such as rooftop solar panels, battery storage, and electric vehicles (EVs) - which enable them to produce enough energy to power their homes, help optimize their energy consumption, and transition from being consumers of energy to becoming prosumers of energy.
1. PowerMatcher / EF-PIPowerMatcher is a transactive energy smart grid coordination mechanism that was piloted in Europe with several utilities as part of an open source Project. It works together with the Energy Flexibility Platform & Interface, EF-Pi in short, is a platform which enables appliances, the smart grid and smart services to communicate with each other.
2. FlexMeasures: LFEnergy is developing energy flexibility apps & services (e.g. to enable demand response) which is crucial, but expensive. The FlexMeasures Platform is the intelligent EMS to support real-time energy flexibility apps, rapidly and scalable.
Open Source Platforms for distributed energy
There have also been some use open source platforms in the electricity sector, but very few in the consumer energy domain. This is partly due to the very narrow niche that these platforms occupy, but also due to the culture with the energy sector. Open source projects usually work best when they are supported by very large organisations that have a strong culture in open source (e.g. Google or Netflix), and there are few examples of this in the electricity industry worldwide.