Increasing and monetising grid flexibility

Goal

To trial a tool that enables quotas of electricity to be traded, using the thermal inertia of large installations or of a pool of installations

Partners

Misurio, EnAlpin, ewz (a Zurich-based electricity company), EPFZ (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich), Swiss Federal Office of Energy, HES-SO Valais-Wallis (Institute of Systems Engineering), IBM, Elimes, The Ark Foundation

There is no choice: some additional flexibility has to be found in the Swiss electricity grid, because of the arrival on a massive scale of new sources of renewable energy, whose production fluctuates. In this context, any schemes that make it possible to defer (reduce or increase) electricity consumption have to be considered.

Misurio, a company based in the Upper Valais, develops and markets control solutions and decision support tools for major energy producers. These systems, which are based on trading, act in accordance with market prices, supply and demand, and tell the energy producers the best time to produce their electricity.

Content of the project

The basic idea of the innovation project supported by The Ark is to apply this type of tool to major installations or to pools of installations that consume electricity and have high thermal inertia. These include, for instance, big cold stores, large heat pumps, heating systems for municipal swimming pools or groups of a few hundred smaller installations. For these installations, turning off heating or refrigeration for brief periods has no effect on users’ comfort.

Cutting off the power to these installations means that the energy they are not consuming is made available to other consumers. Conversely, consumption can be encouraged when there is too much electricity available on the grid. This therefore allows short-term smoothing of production (offering control energy), or optimisation of supply and demand at regional level (reducing the amount of energy transmitted and increasing grid stability).

The project conducted by Misurio and its partners consists of developing and testing a full-scale simulator to control these large installations and selling this flexibility potential to Swissgrid, which manages Switzerland’s national grid. These unused quotas of electricity generate revenue through the charges made for reserving them and also for actually using them.

To test its tool, Misurio carried out a full-scale simulation, based on the actual figures for the control energy market in Switzerland in 2011 and 2012. Simulations with these real figures have been carried out, based on the activation or deactivation of the power supply to 5000 private boilers under contract with the Zurich electricity distributor EWZ.

Practical outcomes

On the basis of the Swiss tertiary control energy market alone, the financial results have not proved sufficiently convincing. This is due to the system for trading allocations of tertiary control energy. However, the electricity market is about to change, with the introduction of an intraday market in Switzerland. This type of energy trading market already exists in Germany and France, providing new opportunities for Misurio’s system. The quotas will be smaller, thus encouraging flexibility. Simulations using the same base of 5000 boilers and the actual 2012 figures for the German intraday market have provided some very attractive financial results. The product is therefore ready to use, and will form a prominent part of the full-scale demonstration system that will soon be set up in the Valais.