SSE Enterprise has launched a new demand side response platform to allow businesses to benefit from helping to balance the grid.
Manufacturers, building managers, local councils and other large energy users can access the wholesale market, Balancing Mechanism and ancillary services through the platform dubbed SSE Enhance, allowing them to generate income by altering their consumption.
By reducing their electricity demand during peak periods, or reducing their own peaks using optimisation and automation of local demand and generation and storage, companies can contribute to keeping the grid balanced.
Additionally, customers can use the SSE Enhance to sell their own excess energy generation – from combined heat and power units, solar panels, wind turbines or batteries – to the grid.
Parameters can be set on the platform to ensure customers are participating at the times of day that works best, and SSE’s optimisation software can then trade the companies assets in response to market events during those periods.
The platform was built using ANM Strata, Smarter Grid Solutions’ (SGS) distributed energy resources management system (DERMS).
Stephen Stead, director of Strategy & Digital Services at SSE Enterprise’s distributed energy business, said that combining SGS’s smart grid capabilities and SSE’s energy and trading experience was “not only a watershed moment for our customers but will also make a significant contribution to the wider efforts of tackling the climate emergency”.
“Combining this new solution with our wider Distributed Energy offering will mean we can work with customers to ensure they have the best deployed solution to meet carbon reduction targets. We can offer the full solution – funding, deployment, management and now optimisation.”
Stead continued to say that the platform will enable a larger deployment of renewable energy generation and reducing capital cost constraints. It will also help reduce the need for expensive upgrades to networks, by providing an alternative way to manage peak times.
SSE Enterprise began working with SGS in October 2019, when the two signed a “landmark” partnership. Since then they have been working together on the Peterborough Integrated Renewables Infrastructure project (PIRI), a two-year Innovate UK design project.
Graham Ault, executive director and co-founder of SGS, said the launch of SSE Enhance was a “major milestone” for both companies.
“Building a platform around ANM Strata has brought our two companies closer together and demonstrated the benefits of harnessing our technology and SSE’s experience in the energy trading markets.
“Working with SSE in this way is a fast-growing part of our strategy to help customers gain access to markets for their energy assets.”
