Germany’s LichtBlick Considers Integrating DERs Into Single Cloud Network
LichtBlick, known in Germany as a retailer of ‘green electricity and green gas’, is looking to take its concept for integrating multiple distributed generation sources into a single network serving international markets, reports a recent PVTech article.
This follows an announcement last May stating LichtBlick and electric vehicle and battery manufacturer Tesla had entered into a global energy collaboration to intelligently integrate Tesla’s new Powerwall Home Batteries into the energy market. LichtBlick and Tesla had plans to expand their relationship to the EU, the USA, Australia, and New Zealand.
LichtBlick features a cloud-based IT platform for integrating distributed energy resources (DERs). Called SwarmDirigent (‘swarm maestro’), this platform has been operating since 2010. Worthy of note is the fact that the platform already integrates more than 1,000 renewable DERs, including photovoltaics, energy storage batteries, wind power and electric vehicles.
The importance of integrating DERs is quickly being recognized in some US markets, including California, New York, and Hawaii.
LichtBlick CEO, Heiko von Tschischwitz, said that while LichtBlick’s focus is currently on selling to ‘front of the meter’ customers like utilities, grid operators and energy service companies, it wants to expand into the residential space, ultimately offering households the chance to share their energy use.
“Today our customers on the global market are utilities, grid operators and energy service companies. Next, our focus will be on private households that will be able to market their energy via our IT platform – in line with Airbnb or Uber for electricity. Today, we are already preparing for this,” von Tschischwitz said.
Other companies in Germany have also been experimenting with various models for aggregating customer storage systems. While barriers to the frequency regulation market are high, requiring multiple-megawatts of resource to be available and therefore several hundred, if not thousand, systems to be acting as one, the trials are thought to be proving their efficacy from an engineering standpoint.
The success of this will be an enterprise well worth watching.
Image via LichtBlick
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