For example, one in the Orkney Islands – a
new housing development of circa 30
houses - was required by building regulations
to have renewable energy, however the
network operator was unable to connect all
the homes to the grid. We used FlexiGrid to
get all the households connected by storing
renewable generation from their solar panels
in our FlexiGrid-controlled batteries and
prevented any excess generation from being
exported to the wider grid.
“We’re now in a position to begin rolling out
our service commercially across the UK and
Ireland and that’s not something that would
have been possible without the new control
platform.”
About Solo Energy
Solo Energy is a Cork-based
renewable energy specialist that
deploys and operates distributed
energy storage systems, in the form of
home batteries and ‘Vehicle-to-Grid’
(V2G) electric vehicle chargers, at
any home or business in the UK that
wants to host one. Hosts store excess
generation in exchange for low cost,
100% renewable electricity, which is
supplied by one of Solo’s local energy
supply partners.
Solo has created an energy trading
economy that allows consumers to
share renewable energy across the
grid via a blockchain-based, peer-to-
peer energy trading platform known
as FlexiGrid. It centrally controls the
batteries and chargers, enabling
hosts to share excess local generation
quickly and conveniently.
“It also includes the first ever fully responsive
Operations Management Interface (OMI),
which provides improved situational
awareness and an intuitive experience
through its modern user interface. This
enables users to bring together information
from all relevant systems and give it real
context, allowing them to understand current
performance and accurately predict future
behaviour.
“System Platform also allows screen
resolution-independent asset templates to
be digitally modelled and shared on any
device. This allows Solo to receive insights
from its operations regardless of location and
keep development and maintenance costs
minimal. It also enables application scaling
and, using drag and drop technology, assets
can be easily deployed onto other machines,
allowing users to scale up from a single
box solution to multi-tier deployment and
delivering a future-proof investment.”
As an organisation unrestricted by the safety
or latency concerns that would make an
on-premise solution necessary, Solo made
the decision to host System Platform in a
cloud environment, eliminating the need for
additional IT infrastructure and delivering a
fully scalable and easily deployable system
that could be installed with minimal resource.
THE OUTCOME
By embracing a cutting-edge control
platform and hosting it in a cloud
environment, Solo has:
completed a number of pilot projects which
have enabled it to prove its business model in
the UK and Ireland
moved from a testbed agreement to a
commercial agreement with the Cork Internet
Exchange by proving the viability of its
business model, and begun preparations for
its commercial rollout
Daniel Dransfield, VP of Engineering at Solo,
said: “System Platform has really helped with
the pilots we’ve been working on.
This digitally connected series of
chargers and batteries is known as a
Virtual Power Plant (VPP) and enables
the flexible supply and demand of
energy across the grid. This flexibility
helps balance the intermittency of
renewable energy generation and
allows hosts to receive energy that
is stored by other hosts whenever
necessary, allowing Solo to shape
demand to follow renewable supply.
By remotely controlling the hosted
batteries and chargers, Solo can
charge them from onsite solar and
wind generation facilities, or from
the grid when sufficient renewable
generation is present. When
renewable generation decreases,
the energy stored in hosts’ batteries
or electric vehicles is used to supply
homes and businesses instead,
enabling the energy to be supplied
cheaply.
Contact: solutionspt.com/contact-us/
Phone: 0161 495 4600
Website: solutionspt.com
Issue 39 PECM
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