Written by: Kristjan Eljand | Technology Scout
This article is for IT companies and start-up’s looking for technological business opportunities in the energy sector. It covers 10 digitalization use-cases of energy sector (read more) and 13 exemplary business opportunities. Each opportunity includes a set of components that can be developed into separate IT solution.
On-site optimization for Commercial, Industrial and Residential buildings
On-site energy optimization means using near real-time information from consumption devices and control systems and using this information to achieve lower costs or higher energy efficiency.
Business opportunity 1: Building Energy Management System (BEMS) that includes Digital Twin solution which enables to simulate the usage of the building, optimization solution that takes energy market data (prices), asset profiles and reduces/increases the consumption so that total cost will be minimized.
Business opportunity 2: Home energy management system (HEMS) that takes day-ahead energy prices, predicts the consumption, solar production, energy storage availability (EV battery) and optimizes the use of energy resources to achieve minimal cost.
Smart districts
Smart districts are city spaces designed or revitalized to reduce CO2 emissions cost-efficiently through an efficient use of energy through smart grids, district heating and cooling, distribution systems, e-mobility and ICT. In other words, smart districts are featured by interoperability among devices over heterogeneous networks to facilitate the interaction between smart buildings, streets, public lighting, mobility, etc.
Business opportunity 3: Imagine a district with smart adaptive street lightning, adaptive traffic lights, infrastructure that integrates electric vehicle charging/discharging capabilities, integration between buildings, renewable energy resources and technologies that enable to monitor and control the interactions between systems.
Energy Aggregators
An aggregator combines multiple consumer loads or generated electricity for sale, purchase or auction in any electricity market.
Business opportunity 4: Building an energy aggregation platform that integrates with Electric Vehicles and is able to aggregate and control their energy usage. If needed, the aggregator increases/decreases the energy consumption and gets compensated by DSO, TSO or … Depending on the business model, the platform could be packaged as a SaaS solution from energy suppliers or used to serve end-users as an independent aggregator.
Customer Data Analytics
Energy companies have an unprecedented opportunity to take value from the huge amount of data generated from the growing number of connected smart meters, sensors, appliances and other devices installed in commercial, industrial and residential buildings.
Business opportunity 5: Building a solution that uses consumption data from smart-meters to detect the consumption patterns of individual appliances and is able to recommend new washing machine when the old one has become very inefficient.
Smart EV charging and charging management
Smart charging of electric vehicles (EVs) assumes some form of control over the EV charging process, allowing EVs to become a flexibility source for the power system (‘batteries on wheels’). Furthermore, smart charging potential will be affected not just by shifting from fossil fuels to electricity, but also by shifting in the mobility paradigm as a whole: from individual car ownership to car-sharing or other co-ownership models.
Business opportunity 6: A software that enables to control the charging from distance. This software can decide to reduce the rate of charging when the electricity price is high (V1G) or charge/discharge the car battery if needed for grid balancing (V2G). On sunny days, the car battery can be used to save the excess solar power. During grid failures or in remote locations, the car battery can be used as a source of electricity.
Urban data platforms
Urban data platforms combine data from a wide range of digital infrastructures in order to help municipalities understand the way infrastructure works and the interdependency between environment, energy, transport and safety.
Business opportunity 7 (Vertical solution): Solution that uses one source of data (example: data from EV charging network) and predicts traffic congestions and urban movement patterns. Here, different datasets provide different possibilities.
Business opportunity 8 (Horizontal solution): Solution that integrated data flows across city systems (from sensor, social media, charging network, water management) to detect patterns and predict problems.
Energy communities
Energy community is an emerging concept that might include joint investments in local renewable projects, energy sharing through Peer-to-peer trading, collective consumption of locally produced renewable energy, etc.
Business opportunity 9: Solution that enables to consume all the locally produced solar energy by the neighborhood instead of selling it to the grid and experiencing grid charges. The key components include peer-to-peer trading capabilities and real-time monitoring and control solutions.
Renewable Energy Source (RES) origin tracking
Tracking renewable energy source means accounting for how much energy was exchanged between specific consumer and producer.
Business opportunity 10: Solution that enables to buy electricity directly from producer using Power Purchasing Agreements (PPAs) (to agree terms) and blockchain to keep track of energy exchange.
Improved Operations & Management
Improved operations and management means moving from reactive maintenance operations to predictive and prescriptive ones. Here, digital twin concept is seen as main enabler. By creating a digital clone of the assets, we are able to compare the actual data with expected one, test different scenarios and optimize assets. Digital data and analytics can reduce power system costs in at least four ways:
- reducing operations and maintenance costs,
- improving power plant and network efficiency,
- reducing unplanned outages,
- extending operational lifetime of assets.
Business opportunity 11: Solution that enables to simulate the work of a wind park, compare the results with real data, predict the failures of the turbines and take preventive actions to protect the defective turbine. The similar logic can be expanded to traditional power plants.
Business opportunity 12: Solution that gathers every human interaction during the business process, detects anomalies in the business process, predicts failures and suggests actions that enable to avoid failure.
Flexibility Market Platforms
Flexibility market platforms include ancillary services for system balancing (delivered to TSOs), services for congestion management (delivered to TSOs and DSOs) and commercial flexibility services (delivered to market parties like balance responsible parties).
Business opportunity 13: Grid congestion management platform that coordinates the energy flexibility between flexibility provider, distribution system operators (DSOs) and transmission system operator (TSO) such that increasing/decreasing energy consumption in one geographical location wouldn’t cause a problem in another location.
