EnergyConnect: The Virtual Power Plant

The virtual combined power plant EnergyConnect is a modern real-time control system that aggregates, controls, and monitors different decentralized energy assets. It is the foundation for new and innovative business models in the age of the energy transition.

Direct marketing: EnergyConnect enables you to cluster diverse energy  technologies in order to archieve the required pool size for successful participation in the electricity markets. We integrate the necessary forecasts via open interfaces or offer them in-house.

Balancing reserve: your controllable plants temporarily increase or reduce the power fed into the grid to ensure grid stability, and you benefit from additional revenues from the various balancing reserve markets.

Smart Dispatch: intelligent control of your plant pool based on price signals on the spot markets. Use our resilient and robust Smart Dispatch mechanism to maintain your schedule even in the event of plant disturbances and outages.

EnergyConnect is based on Fraunhofer IEE's extensive experience in the fields of renewable energies and virtual power plants. Since 2010, the system has been further developed into a robust, secure and scalable solution. For many years, it has been in operational use by our business partners and excels with a modern web interface for numerous research projects.  Our virtual power plant now aggregates an installed capacity of more than 4 GW.

We combine our latest insights from research and practice to develop new outstanding solutions and business models together with you as an innovation partner. These range from designing a virtual power plant tailored to your requirements (on premise or SaaS) to individual consulting, research and development services in the context of decentralized energy plants, their intelligent aggregation and marketing.

Innovative use cases - a selection of reference projects

Partner with Fraunhofer IEE and benefit from the latest insights from research and development. Would you like to build on this or do you have your own exciting project ideas? Please feel free to contact us.

Topic

Balancing reserve

Bidding strategies and ICT requirements for the provision of balancing services with wind and PV farms in Europe.

Thema

Grid restoration

Use of regenerative decentralized plants for system-serving behavior in critical grid situations and for grid reconstruction (black start capability).

Thema

Flexibility markets

Connection of a virtual power plant to a regional flexibility market to reduce grid bottlenecks.

Thema

Reactive Power

Provision of reactive power from a pool of wind & PV plants under consideration of grid operator requirements.

Thema

Resilience

AI-based detection and resilient prevention of cyber-attacks and technical failures in virtual power plants and distributed energy systems.

Topic

Micro-flexibilities

Leveraging micro-flexibles (e-vehicles, heat pumps) for ancillary services using the smart meter gateway infrastructure.