Photomate Romania is in discussions with several clients for the creation of a business model regarding the balancing of electrical networks using energy storage, and the possible investments in this direction will accumulate “many millions of euros”.
“There are already companies we are in discussions with and we are creating a business model for network balancing services. These are investments of many millions of euros. Without such services, digitization will not be possible”, said Adrian Paraschiv, Country Manager of the company, during the DigitALL 2023 conference, organized by Energynomics.
Given the continued growth in the number of prosumers, both residential and industrial, Paraschiv believes that electricity distribution operators will need to migrate more towards the service side and not just stick to the power transmission component.
In fact, the company receives more and more technical support requests from prosumers and, analyzing their production and consumption history, found the existence of very large voltage variations in the network. This happens when a small network segment is used simultaneously by a large number of prosumers.
“Photovoltaic systems are disconnected when the voltage of 230 Volts is exceeded for 15 minutes. That’s what happens when many PV producers inject energy into a small segment of the grid at the same time. This can be solved if the distributors will bring transformers with automatic regulation and this enters the field of smart grid and smart metering”, added Paraschiv.
He warned that especially in the localities bordering the big cities congestion of the low and medium voltage network is expected to occur as more and more prosumers appear. The fastest way UATs will be able to respond to these challenges would be to create local micro-grids. It is estimated that there will be around 90,000 more prosumers in the coming years and this will put even more pressure on the distribution network.
At the same time, in order to eliminate these pressures on the electricity grid, it will be necessary for domestic and industrial consumers to change their consumption profile. For example, some firms could consider carrying out production activities during the night when energy is cheaper. Another solution is energy storage, which will also support electricity distributors, although this field is still not fully regulated in Romania.
“I see the prosumers part as a bit selfish because they inject into the network during the day, but they expect that in the evening and in the morning, they draw from the network as much as possible. Consuming energy only when we want and how we want will not solve the problem, on the contrary, new challenges will arise and we cannot put pressure on only one of the parties involved. It is certain, however, that this change in consumption habits will happen when we switch to hourly billing. And without digitization we will not be able to do this. These things need to be brought under the same hat of digitization and we need to find solutions together with technology providers to mitigate the challenges,” continued Paraschiv.
The DigitALL 2023 conference was organized by Energynomics, in partnership with the CIO Council and with the support of our partners Eaton Electric, Huawei, NextGen, Schneider Electric, Siemens.