Green the Flex: Achieving significant greenhouse gas emission reductions by intelligent electricity load shifting on the customer level.

Introduction

In Austria and many other European countries, the energy system is just before a major transition towards 100% renewable generation. Since renewable generation is not only seasonal but also short-term fluctuating and hard to predict, we need to harmonise the electricity demand with the generation, both time-wise and region-wise.

Flexibility and Decentralised Units

Flexibility is the ability to do exactly that by managing and optimising decentralised units. Based on the business plan, we want to aggregate more than 2500 decentralised units in three years and use them for ancillary services, making more than 6 MW of power and more than 5 GWh/a short-term load shift potential accessible to our energy system as flexibility.

Target Units

We are aiming for smaller, mostly residential units like:

• Heat pumps
• Electric car charging stations
• Hot water generation
• Storage systems

Our goal is to provide easy-to-use applications for customers to match their demand to the behind-the-meter generation and enable them to directly participate in the energy markets by delivering flexibility with their devices.

Support for Energy Communities

Additionally, we will adopt and use our systems to support Energy Communities once the respective law is passed in Austria.

Market Challenges

The most challenging flexibility services markets in terms of technical requirements are the ancillary services of:

1. Frequency Containment Reserve
2. Automatic Frequency Restoration Reserve

By scaling our solution and pooling more than 2500 customers within the next three years, we want to open those two markets for customer flexibility.

Activation and Environmental Impact

The flexibility can be activated within seconds. With the link between citizens and energy markets, not only is the electricity system supported, but CO2 emissions are also going to be reduced. The fund enables scaling up customers' load shifting potential to a relevant size.

Conclusion

This creates a win-win-win situation for the customers, EVN, cyberGRID, Fronius, tiko, and, foremost, the environment.