This article was featured on the CTRM Center blog in November 2022 – Written by Dr. Gary M. Vasey
With the energy transition, batteries have become an important asset on the grid to supply some capability to store excess power to use when needed. Needless to say, software to optimise the operation of batteries and dispatch of power from them, has become increasingly needed as well. One vendor that has been working in this area is Energy One in Australia.
The Australian power market is a gross pool market with 5-minute settlement increments. It is energy only with no associated capacity market and so prices can be volatile, I was told by Energy One’s Ross Attrill. Australia has also been leading the way to some extent deploying very sizeable battery assets. “Some big batteries have gone in with some 656 MW of grid scale batteries already operating and over 140 battery projects in the pipeline,” Ross told me. “It’s a very interesting area to deal with as batteries are also going into the distribution side, for example. So, we have applied our process optimisation tool, enFlow, to this problem.”
According to Energy One, enFlow is “a platform for automating and managing business processes and for integrating systems. It has been specifically designed for the energy industry supporting operation, settlement, trading, reporting and alarming needs for electricity, gas and carbon markets.” The tool is also used in other areas such as with Virtual Power Plants, PPAs, integrating disparate systems, market, automated bidding, and asset monitoring and more. For battery optimisation, Energy One has taken the market rules but focused on reducing costs to build out a battery optimisation tool with enFlow. “It attempts to maximize return of capital from the battery asset,” he told me.
As energy markets go intra-day and faster with significant volumes of data to consume, interpret and manage, business processes need to get automated to cope. Ross sees enFlow playing an important role in this automation of processes. “We are working on batteries in Australia at the moment but will certainly also look at European and UK power markets and battery optimisation in the near future.” he told me. In fact, the topic is so interesting and dynamic that we will feature Ross along with guests from Brady Technologies and Enegen, in a forthcoming CTRMRadio podcast on the topic. Stay tuned for more details.
Written by Dr. Gary M. Vasey
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