Green the Flex

The shift towards a sustainable energy system with 100% renewable energy comes with a number of challenges that need to be addressed. For example, the volatility of renewable energy sources can threaten the stability of the power grid. For the power grid to remain stable, generation and consumption must always be in balance. In times when electricity generation from water, wind and sun is not sufficient to cover consumption, fossil power plants are currently needed to provide the necessary stability. Since electricity generation from renewables fluctuates not only seasonally but also in the short term and is difficult to predict, electricity demand must be matched with generation, both temporally and regionally. So-called flexibility is the ability to do just that by controlling and optimizing decentralized units. The cooperative project “Green the flex” is investigating innovative approaches to increasing flexibility.

Objective

The idea of the project is to shift the electricity consumption of households to times when sufficient electricity, ideally 100% green electricity, is available. The focus here is on the typical large consumers of a household, such as hot water boiler, heat pump, battery storage or e-car, where time shifts do not lead to any loss of comfort. For a single household, this step is not significant, but if a large number of households are integrated, energy on the order of a power plant can be quickly saved, thus reducing the load on the grid.

The goal of “Green the flex” is to provide customers with easy-to-use applications that allow them to adjust their electricity demand “behind the meter”, provide flexibility with their appliances, and thus participate directly in the energy markets. By 2025, 3,000 households will thus be bundled in a smart swarm storage system.

Approach and methodology

Matching demand to generation, also called “demand-side management,” can reduce the use of fossil fuel power plants and the associated CO2 emissions. This project alone is expected to save at least 3,500 tons of CO2 per year. The consumption peaks are smoothed and thus even more electricity from renewable energies can be integrated and used in the existing grid.

This gives end customers the opportunity to actively participate in the energy transition. The optimization assistant “joulie” is the technical core of this project. It connects the power grid and the consumers in the household to form an intelligent overall system, a so-called “swarm storage”.

In “Green the flex,” more than 3,000 decentralized units will be consolidated and used for auxiliary services in three years. This means that more than 6 MW of capacity and more than 5 GWh/a of short-term load shifting potential are available to our energy system as flexibility.