BESS and V2G are coming to save the grid!

More variable renewable generation from solar and wind needs more clean firm capacity to balance supply and demand.

Over short timescales, we need this capacity to maintain a stable frequency on the power grid. If supply and demand aren’t in balance, grid frequency can go outside of a safe range, potentially leading to automatic disconnections and load shedding. To avoid this, grid operators have created ancillary markets, where assets get paid to keep grid frequency stable, as my colleague Rachel explains in her series of videos on ancillary services.

We also need this capacity to balance supply and demand over intraday periods driven by the solar diurnal cycle, where wholesale energy prices are depressed or even go negative during periods of high solar irradiance. Wholesale energy markets create the incentives for this kind of balancing too, as Genna explains with this series of videos on wholesale markets.

Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS) are a great resource to participate in these markets. They can charge when energy prices are low, respond quickly to frequency disturbances, and discharge when energy prices are high. This week’s video from Fabian looks at how they can also be a valuable balancing resource in off-grid systems. So really, BESS have the potential to reduce supply interruptions on a system-level as well as on a site-level.

Future system planning scenarios from grid operators like AEMO in Australia, and National Grid in the UK are forecasting the need for a lot more battery storage capacity as the renewable build-out continues.

These kinds of scenario plans also forecast a big increase in load on our power system from the electrification of transport. In fact, most forecasts predict we’ll have a lot more battery storage capacity in vehicles than we do in stationary storage. All this battery capacity within vehicles has an immense potential for grid support. We're seeing an increasing number of our customer's use Gridcog to model revenue opportunities from their batteries in EV fleets.

While stationary batteries or vehicle batteries are a great resource to balance supply and demand over very short and intraday timescales, they aren’t the right resource for meeting multi-day or seasonal balancing requirements. Without long duration energy storage, we’ll probably be depending on gas generation for decades to come no matter how many EVs we have with V2G enabled... a topic we’ll dig into in a future newsletter.

Future Energy Scenarios 2024?

UK’s National Grid published this year’s Future Energy Scenarios (check out our recent blog post where we dug into National Grids Future Energy Scenarios in more detail), which along with a steady ramp-up of renewable energy generation also focuses strongly on consumer flexibility in I&C, residential, and road/transport sectors. This is key, National Grid claim, to reducing peak electricity demand such as during evening times.

In numbers, the Holistic Transition Scenario projects demand flexibility to reach 15 GW in 2030 and 71 GW in 2050, with a whopping 68% expected to come from transport – that’s ~49 GW. V2G (vehicle-to-grid) functionality alone is expected to have the potential to reduce demand by 32 GW by 2050, the largest of any consumer flexibility.

Gridcog is optimistic about the market services that can be delivered by V2G-enabled fleets. Fleets have more predictable availability than public or home charging and their significant aggregate battery storage capacity may just about justify the administrative cost and complexity of finding a wholesale route-to-market.

Product Corner: EV Fleet Schedules

Gridcog’s Library lets users configure complex EV Fleet Schedules based on your fleets size and operational requirements. By defining times where the vehicle is a) connected to a charger and can charge or discharge, b) connected to a charger but cannot charge, and c) on route, these schedules can be configured via our UI (or by uploading a spreadsheet for large or complex vehicle fleets).

By adding EV Fleet Control Schedules to your Gridcog projects, the software will co-optimise charging (and discharging) profiles for your fleet, taking into account connection constraints, energy supply arrangements, co-located resources like solar and stationary batteries, and opportunities to provide wholesale energy and ancillary market services.

This allows you to minimise charging cost and maximise V2G value without impacting your fleet’s operational requirements.

That’s all for this week. If you’d like to see how Gridcog can model your energy projects, click here to book a call with our team.

?Or, if you have any interesting project use-cases you’d like to see modelled in Gridcog, email our marketing magician [email protected] and we’ll spin it up!