Energy Pool: The New Way of Power Generation, Distribution and Consumption
The growth of renewable energy sources and distributed generation introduce major challenges for all electricity system stakeholders. Renewable variability and small-scale power generation units require utilities and system operators to find new cost-effective solutions to ensure security of supply and adapt the electricity grid. The revolution has already started, in the coming years, our energy supply-demand balancing will lie in optimized energy generation, distribution, and usage. Moreover, when it comes to the domain under discussion, there is one company that has become synonymous with energy management and demand response more than any other entity—Energy Pool. Founded in 2009, the company is Europe’s largest, and first, demand response operator and has been continuously pushing the envelope when it comes to the opportunity for industrial and commercial electricity users to monetize their flexibilities.
Jean-Pierre DUCHATEL, CIO and CTO at Energy Pool likens the electric power industry in both developed and developing countries to any other sector riddled with challenges. For utilities in developed markets, the desideratum is not only cheaper electricity but also value-added services to entice consumers; for utilities in emerging markets, there is constant battle to balance supply-shortage to keep blackouts at a minimum. “We enable grid or transmission system operators (TSO) as well as power utilities to provide electricity to consumers as per demand by operating flexibilities from large electricity consumers who can alter their consumption.”
The firm aggregates consumers and identifies and assesses the value of their flexibilities in the market which can translate into more than 20 percent of savings on electricity bills. Its solutions and services enable utilities to take on the role of an aggregator and monetize consumer’s flexibilities. Energy Pool’s homegrown solution, Distributed Energy Resources Management System (DERMS) is a cloud-native, SaaS-enabled demand response management platform which leverages technologies such as IoT, analytics, and machine learning to rope in all types of assets which can afford flexibility.
Jean-Pierre DUCHATEL, CIO and CTO at Energy Pool likens the electric power industry in both developed and developing countries to any other sector riddled with challenges. For utilities in developed markets, the desideratum is not only cheaper electricity but also value-added services to entice consumers; for utilities in emerging markets, there is constant battle to balance supply-shortage to keep blackouts at a minimum. “We enable grid or transmission system operators (TSO) as well as power utilities to provide electricity to consumers as per demand by operating flexibilities from large electricity consumers who can alter their consumption.”
The firm aggregates consumers and identifies and assesses the value of their flexibilities in the market which can translate into more than 20 percent of savings on electricity bills. Its solutions and services enable utilities to take on the role of an aggregator and monetize consumer’s flexibilities. Energy Pool’s homegrown solution, Distributed Energy Resources Management System (DERMS) is a cloud-native, SaaS-enabled demand response management platform which leverages technologies such as IoT, analytics, and machine learning to rope in all types of assets which can afford flexibility.
We enable grid or transmission system operators to provide electricity to consumers as per demand by operating flexibilities
The technology is OpenADR 2.0 certified which ensures seamless communication between all the stakeholders (consumers, power grids, and TSOs) of the demand response business. “We also provide a complete range of knowledge transfer services wherein we help utilities identify opportunities for services which they can sell to their customers.”
Given the complexities of the space and the scope of a robust system, DERMS has been developed with global usability and high flexibility under consideration. DUCHATEL tells that teams at Energy Pool are a healthy mix of “different types of IT experts” with expertise in domains such as IoT and analytics that allows the organization be “agile and creative.” Any development job at Energy Pool, he adds, is a close affair between the firm, the end-users and the utilities, making each solution unique and ensuring that each fits snugly into a client’s environment and performs precisely as intended. The company provides an additional service wherein it monitors assets round the clock to detect anomalies and takes pre-emptive actions to thwart any potential problem.
As per what it calls DR 4.0, Energy Pool aims to increase the value for large industrial electricity consumers by integrating the component of energy management into the digital factory solutions provided by its partner firms.
Although the popularity of demand response management in Asia Pacific is nowhere close to that of in the U.S. and Europe, Energy Pool sees a strong momentum and its prospects are bountiful in the region, as highlighted by Energy Pool’s quick customer acquisition (several hundreds of Japanese clients through commercial operations with two major local utilities, including TEPCO) since it entered the market three years back in 2014. In addition, the region’s increasing affinity toward new technology could very well serve the growth of VPP - Virtual Power Plant systems, enabling global optimization from end-users assets to distributed generation and grid infrastructure, putting Asia at the forefront of the Energy revolution. Certifying the relevance of distributed generation in the years ahead DUCHATEL says, “Our seven years of operational existence prove that flexibilities from consumers can be as reliable as the flexibilities that grid operators obtain from traditional generation assets.”
