Lichtblick
= Swarm and Cloud-Based Platform for Distributed Energy Resources
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By Andy Colthorpe:
"Lichtblick, a retailer of ‘green electricity and green gas’ headquartered in Germany, is looking to take its concept for integrating multiple distributed generation sources into a single network into international markets.
In business in its homeland since 1998, and reaching the million-customer mark in 2014, the company has had a cloud-based IT platform for integrating distributed energy resources (DERs), called SwarmDirigent (‘swarm maestro’), in operation since 2010. The platform already integrates more than 1,000 DERs, including photovoltaics, energy storage batteries, wind power and electric vehicles.
The platform allows operators to balance various DERs within their networks, meaning it can integrate storage-specific applications such as peak shaving, solar load shifting as well as grid-balancing.
The importance of integrating DERs is quickly being recognised in markets such as California, New York and Hawaii, all have which have introduced measures over the past few weeks to enable their greater deployment on their respective networks. In a feature for PV Tech Power on the importance of Big Data for the renewable-powered grid of the future, analyst Omar Saadeh of GTM Research said utilities are “rightfully concerned” by the technical challenge of adding and balancing a diverse range of resources, including variable renewable output, to their networks. Saadeh said that IT platforms and intelligent energy management systems would likely be key to solving these difficulties.
Holland’s grid had a ‘software-defined’ power plant which makes 100MW of DERs dispatchable added to it by US energy analytics company Autogrid and Dutch energy retailer Eneco in November last year.
Lichtblick touted the versatility of its product outside its home market of Germany where it is used to optimise DERs within a grid-connected setting. The cloud-based solution has also been installed at a project in Vietnam to displace diesel use on an island, as well as in other regions where it is used to manage the self-sufficient use of solar-plus-storage. The company said it wants to expand into other regions including other EU states, the US and Oceania." (http://www.pv-tech.org/news/german-green-utility-goes-international-with-sharing-economy-concept-for-di)