The sharing economy is coming to the energy business – and to a household near you.
CyberGrid has already started the journey of re-shaping the energy market. “If the sharing economy can work in other industries – why not in the energy market?” For a long time, the energy market was driven by centralist production and distribution schemes. Now, CyberGrid propagates the interconnection of energy sources with batteries to create a greener energy future. “We believe that the shared use of resources to optimize the decentralised renewable energy production is one of the most important steps of the energy transition”, Reinhard Wöber states.
For CyberGrid the end-customer is the key protagonist in the energy transition – and modern technology is the enabler. Successful shared ownership of flexibility-providing assets, such as decentralised storage and generation will be demonstrated in the project CROSSBOW, with CyberGrid playing a significant technological role. While flexibility assets, demand response systems, and virtual power plants, are becoming common providers of balancing services in some European markets like Slovenia, Austria, France and the UK, they are normally owned and operated only by electricity retailers or independent aggregators. However, their business objectives might differ from those of the actual providers of flexibility, the customer. Hence, to enable higher penetration of clean energies the customer is key – and new business models must reflect the value, also for the end-customer.
For EMS, the Transmission Operator in Serbia, it is compelling to participate in projects like CROSSBOW. With a written vision to work towards a transmission system to become sustainable, the planning of a market opening calls for visionary ideas to engage the end-customer.
“We believe that a set of distributed storage units owned by customers should be managed by network operators in order to contribute to the quality of the electricity supply and to keep the grid balanced. It will reduce our operation costs for the entire energy system, and it would become a de facto community-based local production eco-system giving self-sufficient value to local residents.” - Aleksandar Kurćubić, Executive Manager for System and Market Operation
Still, there is a lot of work to do, but for CyberGrid there is a clear strategy ahead. The technology for sharing energy is ready, and numerous countries are willing to go new ways, to support the energy transition with a focus on the end-customer.
