Scene is delighted to have been selected as a finalist of the Power Forward Challenge, a UK and Canada collaboration to ‘challenge Canadian and U.K. companies to design better power grids, connecting our nations to clean, user-friendly grids and helping to prevent power outages.’ Scene has been innovating within the energy system since 2011 and is pleased to bring its emphasis on local energy to this competition.
Alongside collaborators Locogen, Mentone Energy and Enbala, our project, Cloud ZUoS, will design and implement our ZUoS (Zonal Use of System) energy services platform. The aim is to provide optimal grid and electricity costs within a local energy market (LEM) context, by integrating grid and load control across generation, storage, and demand side response. The project will take place over the next 18 months. The Power Forward Challenge has been supported by National Resources Canada and Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy. Our pilot is based in Huntly (north east Scotland), working with local domestic and commercial consumers, and local generators (coordinated with Huntly & District Development Trust), to develop and trial the ZUoS platform.
It will address three overarching grid constraints that prohibit deployment of distributed energy resources (DER): thermal constraints; lack of bi-directional power flow capability; absence of a local trading framework. These barriers result in rising grid costs which are socialised across all consumers, a loss of revenue by not fully optimising DER resources at a local level, and slow and sub-optimal grid access provisioning of new renewable generation.
The ZUoS energy services platform functions at three levels: individual building, local distribution level and wider distribution level. Its purpose is to allow operators to automate energy services to increase efficiency and generate value; to enable more agile system management while rewarding local generation and supply. With the anonymised data, we can simulate a range of new energy system scenarios and define appropriate charging structures for different consumer types for an Energy as a Service offering for licensed supply partners.
The project will integrate the ZUoS energy trading platform with Enbala’s Virtual Power Plant platform to deliver a market coupled virtual power plant system (MCVVP). The MCVPP facilitates local energy trading between consumers, prosumers and generators, and the control and coordination of IoT consumer appliances and DER assets within low-voltage network zones to enable active network Management (ANM) from a demand and supply perspective.
ZUoS energy services will monitor and forecast DER assets to simulate low voltage grid zones, creating a transparent quantification of grid utilisation. Grid data and algorithms will enable grid cost calculations and grid use price calculations per zone to enable market-based payments for grid use by consumers in the future, subject to market reform.
The ZUoS platform will provide a route to accelerate the uptake and management of new smart power, heat and transport technologies, such as electric heat pumps and electric vehicles.