Good energy in our local neighborhoods with shared battery solutions
Gridcog can model the cost and value of Community Batteries for every stakeholder: networks, suppliers/retailers, customers, and community asset owners. Community Batteries are a new concept with multiple ownership options, technical and deployment options, and commercial options. Gridcog enables the full value-stack for every option to be quantified to assure the actual benefits of shared community storage for everyone.
Energy suppliers and asset owners can collaborate to create new retail electricity supply products to share the value of community batteries with local communities and electricity consumers. Storage-as-a-service subscriptions, discounted time-of-use rates, or different feed-in-tariff arrangements: you can model all of these retail options in Gridcog, including assessing the impact of network-use-of-service charges and the opportunity to earn revenue from market services to enable new cheaper and greener retail product experience.
Most of the value we want to share back with local communities will come from revenue generated in wholesale energy markets: energy arbitrage, ancillary services, and reserve capacity. Forecasting this potential value to support an investment decision requires lots of different elements: forward price curves for market services; an accurate technical model of battery capacity and performance, including degradation over time; consideration for local network limits and network service costs; and an accurate simulation of the real-time optimizer that might control the battery − Gridcog has all of this covered.
Gridcog can model the avoided short-term and long-term marginal network costs that arise from community batteries, showing the impact on feeder-level coincident maximum demand and reverse flows. Gridcog can also be used to test different network pricing options or network support contract options, potentially in the form of local flexibility markets to incentivise asset owners to deploy in the most favorable network locations to deliver the maximum value from local shared storage.
Once community battery assets are deployed Gridcog can track and report on the delivered value for all stakeholders, compared to the model. This independent tracking provides five potential benefits: (1) meet commercial performance reporting requirements for the project; (2) provide transparency to all stakeholders and partners; (3) detect underperformance so corrective actions can be taken; (4) enable contracts incorporating commercial performance guarantees to be structured and settled; and (5) provide more data to enable better investment decisions to be made for subsequent project.
We’re shifting away from a small number of large centrally located and primarily thermal (fossil-fuel powered) generators to a very large number of small, distributed and primarily renewable (wind, solar) generators and energy storage systems (batteries).
There’s a healthy debate underway in the energy sector around where battery energy storage assets should be located within electricity systems, in order to create the greatest possible value, both for their owners and for society more broadly.
We’ve been told that battery energy storage systems are an essential part of the world’s future energy system – but how, exactly?
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