Beedata supports industrial energy communities
The current energy and environmental crisis makes even more evident the need to develop renewable energies, always guaranteeing grid stability and energy supply. Stability in renewable energy systems is essential in order to be a real alternative that favors their implementation. This challenge is only achievable with the commitment of all stakeholders, including, above all, energy consumers.
The awareness and commitment of all stakeholders (government, companies and citizens) is increasingly high, understanding that their participation in the energy transition process is fundamental and central. This centrality and importance is given in shared consumption and specifically in the form of energy communities (EC), which are at a moment of hatching in Spain. In short, a new collective form of creation, participation and energy management that is here to stay.
In this post we focus on industrial energy communities, where from Beedata, we have put knowledge and experience at the service of these community projects, allowing an easy and fair access of citizens and companies to local renewable energy resources and their benefits in the social field.
Since 2021 we have been developing tools to address one of the great challenges: to make easy the complexity of these new systems that go through the digitization and simplification of the processes of creation, participation and management. Although it is a hybrid tool, today we will focus on the industrial field and in a second installment we will talk about citizens.
Insiga II, the project that supports and stimulates the creation of industrial energy communities
In 2021, together with Inergy, ARCbcn and Navarra de Suelo y Vivienda and AIN, we developed the Insiga II project.
The objective of this project is to develop an intelligent software application that facilitates and dynamizes the creation of energy communities through shared photovoltaic self-consumption projects and to study the technical and economic feasibility of an energy community in industrial parks. Through the tool, it is possible to group companies in the framework of industrial parks with collective self-consumption, facilitating digitization and access to opportunities in the current moment of energy transition and transformation towards a decarbonized and more competitive industry 4.0.
Beedata was in charge of designing two artificial intelligence algorithms (genetic algorithms) for the calculation and optimization of hourly coefficients, so that the number and type of participants can be defined according to the best profiles and the best possible distribution, guaranteeing the lowest possible number of participants.
The other participants in the project are Inergy, which was in charge of developing the generation simulation and economic-financial calculation software, based on its self-consumption SIE module, the engineering and consulting firm Armengol & Ros Consultors Associats (ARCbcn), in charge of creating a resource kit to support energy communities, and Navarra de Suelo y Vivienda (Nasuvinsa), the entity responsible for the pilot and the definition and validation of requirements.
Incomuner 4.0, the indispensable tool for industrial ECs
Another project related to energy communities is Incommuner 4.0, developed together with AIN, Inergy and Nasuvinsa. In this project we wanted to develop, as a continuation of Insiga II, a solution that would allow an integrated management of energy communities in industrial parks and mixed projects (residential-industrial). It is a beneficial application for all parties involved in a community, as it allows:
In the community administration environment, it allows to manage the economic-financial and energy aspects, as well as the status of the community at different levels (energy, economic, technical…).
In the environment of the participants, it guarantees an optimization of the installation with a control of deviations and failures, and the optimal allocation of the shared energy coefficients according to the consumption of each participant, which as allowed by law can be done every 4 months. It also allows to know the share of energy allocated each day to each member through an APP, which includes advice on when to use the different consumptions, according to the hours of generation and prices.
In terms of governance, it allows to calculate the impact on quotas, distribution coefficients, investment, and performance, additions and deletions of participants, as well as possible extensions, or battery, EV chargers, etc.
And finally, in the public environment, which provides transparency and automation, facilitating the reporting of the results of generation, self-consumption and CO2 reductions of each community, to society.
In this project, Beedata participates as a software development partner. Within the partner environment, we offer each participant the Bee Advisor application, our web app that allows quick access to their energy profile (daily, weekly and monthly) and advice on when to best use energy, providing transparency, control and management of their energy consumption and generation. We complement the web-app with an energy management platform for community managers, to optimize, every hour, the allocation of shared energy coefficients according to the energy profile of each participant. This work ensures maximum energy self-consumption and minimum export to the grid, increasing the creation of income produced and retained in the EC itself.
We hope to continue to actively participate in the development of energy communities by adapting our solutions to the possible challenges and changes of these projects, in order to always respond to the needs of their stakeholders. For this reason, we have won another project that starts in early 2023, called Insiga III, which adds to the existing functionalities, the possibility of active demand management, through batteries, and other loads, such as heat pumps, or EV chargers and solves the management of the flexibility that renewable energies and, in our case, photovoltaic installations have.
