Virtual power plants (VPPs) can greatly increase the value of home energy storage systems for a range of stakeholders including grid operators, utilities and their customers, according to SolarEdge, which has just launched a VPP software platform.
The Israeli company, known for products ranging from power optimisers and inverters to monitoring and energy management solutions, has over the past couple of years introduced more energy storage compatible inverter products and management solutions to markets including Europe and the US.
“The one word that is most important here is aggregation,” Lior Handelsman, VP for marketing and product strategy and also one of the company’s founders, told Energy-Storage.News of the platform, which Handelsman said “starts in the cloud”.
Essentially, VPPs take numerous battery energy storage systems, typically sited behind-the-meter in customer’s houses, and aggregate together their capabilities. It means they can be more easily controlled by the network operator and can be used to provide grid services.
“To take one example: [Let’s say] you are a network operator, tasked with stabilising the grid and keeping the grid stable. There are so many different distributed generation resources on the grid making your task more and more complex,” Handelsman said.
Network operators could be constrained by money, space or time from building out new infrastructure such as substations in neighbourhoods where there is high peak demand in summer. Instead those same operators could take advantage of growing numbers of distributed energy resources (DERs) on their grid that include solar PV systems, EVs and EV chargers and of course battery energy storage systems.
“If you have a peak in a specific suburb, all you need to do is tell the storage systems in that suburbs to feed energy just for a few minutes into the grid to support that peak. Or if you have a peak you ask all the EV chargers in that area to stop charging or throttle down their charging for a few minutes. These are the bigger examples, but that can be made more and more complex as the challenge becomes more and more complex,” Handelsman said.
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