Grid services ensure balance and constant energy supply

The demand for sustainable energy is growing and that can cause problems when it comes to energy supply. Does the supply meet the demand on a cloudy or windless day, for example? During the IT Infra webinar, which will take place on Thursday 20 May at 14:30, Bart Nieuwenhuis and his colleague Ronald van Veen from Vertiv will delve deeper into the possibilities of grid services and fast frequency response. Thanks to this service, grid operators can have sufficient control capacity at all times to keep supply and demand on the electricity grid in balance, even during peak times.

By Frank van de Ven

The energy industry is undergoing some dramatic changes as renewables, distributed generation, decarbonization and increasing demand transform traditional energy management. Balancing grid services help the grid operator balance supply and demand.

His presentation will discuss several possibilities of balancing grid services. “This system ensures balance,” says Nieuwenhuis. “The demand for sustainable energy in the form of wind and solar energy is high, while these energy sources can cause imbalance due to their unpredictability. For example, if the sun disappears behind the clouds or if the wind dies down, you have no energy generation.”

Off-peak hours
Balancing grid services can buffer and store energy, so that it can be used immediately during peak times. Vertiv offers a control mechanism that allows energy managers to have the desired amount of energy at the push of a button. Nieuwenhuis: “By making a UPS available as a data center owner, we help grid operators. Within a second, they have energy available to restore the balance of the grid. This service is very useful for grid operators, because they have a larger capacity. Because they already have UPSs, this saves on the purchase costs because only some hardware or a larger battery is needed.”

Another advantage of grid services is that overcapacity is a thing of the past. “Normally, energy is lost with overcapacity and that costs money. By using control capacity and buffering the energy in the UPS (battery), this energy is saved for a later stage. This also makes it possible to purchase and store energy cheaply during off-peak hours and to use it during expensive peak times. That saves you money,” Nieuwenhuis concludes.

The IT Infra webinar will take place on Thursday 20 May at 14:30. The interactive presentation by Bart Nieuwenhuis and Ronald van Veen from Vertiv will take place online. You can register for this via this link. click here to see an overview of all presentations.