Terna plays the strategic card ofEnergy of things (EoT) and launches a new platform with the Swiss SwissGrid and the German-Dutch TenneT: Equigy. The strategic design is to use technological innovation to improve system balancing and connect millions of small consumers who – with their everyday electrical devices such as air conditioners or induction hobs or with electric cars and photovoltaic systems – they ask but can also contribute electricity to the grid. It's a step further in the path towards the energy transition and the increasingly massive use of renewable sources which supply precious green energy but also put the system under stress when the quantities produced are reduced due to bad weather or, conversely, bottlenecks are created in the flow of energy from South to North, for example.
La new Equigy platform precisely wants to create a "square" where all the protagonists of this distributed energy are interconnected with each other – explains the press release with which Terna announced the signing of the joint venture between the three European grid operators – "actively contributing to the balancing and efficiency of the national grid". Smart homes, smart meters, smart columns are the tools – all related to the Internet of things (Iot) – that will facilitate aggregation. The resources have already been entered into the Business plan 2021-25 which allocates 900 million to digitization and technological innovation.
The idea is also to encourage device owners to connect to the platform also to obtain a profit represented by the value recognized in the provision of network services. "For example - prefigures Terna itself - the value for this service could be of the same order of magnitude as the cost of recharging an electric car, thus making sustainable mobility even more attractive".
The joint venture was born from three partners but the aim of Equigy, after an initial pilot phase, "is to create an even more extensive network of users at an international level, creating a blockchain platform that involves, through the other stakeholders in the supply chain such as aggregators, consumers and manufacturers, all the new resources distributed to enable them participation in the electricity market and provide services. Thanks to this platform, electric vehicles, production plants, residential and industrial mini-plants, electric water heaters, storage systems combined with photovoltaics will be able to contribute to the safety of an electricity system which in the next few years, with the growth and diffusion of ever greater quantities of renewable sources, will be increasingly articulated and complex”.
Source: Terna
Another far from negligible detail is the declared impartiality of the three partners who guarantee their neutral role in the initiative in which they plan to involve aggregators and other network managers “in order to find efficient and shared solutions. In any case, the system is not exclusive and it will be up to the aggregator to decide whether or not to make use of the platform's services”.
The new initiative also aims to strengthen the grid by increasing the resources that can be used for balancing: Terna estimates that in 2030 – the year foreseen for the European decarbonisation objectives and the National Energy and Climate Plan – “millions of these resources will be connected to the grid, such as electric cars or heat pumps: together they will be able to supply a total power exceeding 5 GW in some periods of the year, a figure comparable to the entire current reserve requirement necessary for the electricity system”.
