Soteria

The Vision

The Product & Data Approach

Soteria created a coordination mechanism among stakeholders in the energy sector enabled by an exchange of messages over IO.E. It should therefore not be regarded as an app providing some service or feature to an individual user with a specific profile and a number of needs to be met.

Nevertheless, Soteria offers something that is crucially missing today: a means to coordinate the actions of many stakeholders in the energy system by sending back and forth the information needed to ensure that all parties can organize themselves to strive towards optimal overall system benefits.

Step 0: Share Virtual Power Plant (VPP) information 

Step 1: Gather grid insights from devices and digital meters 

Step 2: Publish grid bandwidth for flexibility 

Step 3: Offer flexibility to market, after which the market clears within the specified grid constraints 

Step 4: Cleared market schedule sent for validation to the system operator 

Step 5: Schedule approved by grid logic agent 

Step 6: Activation of residential flexibility 

Step 7: Audit trail & settlement information gathered from digital meters 

The scope of the sandboxing phase

During the sandboxing period, the scope of the use-case was further refined to:

The sandbox results

A. Thanks to an IO.E information exchange process, more customers within a certain geographic area can take part in flexibility mechanisms, in full coherence with the grid.

Validated: Field tests unlock 27 assets and up to 70kW on one single feeder as examples.

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B. Markets & aggregators can use grid information given up-front and adapt to a set of constraints as a preventive way to avoid grid problems. (as opposed to curative measures to solve problems once they already occur)

Validated: the process was run successfully with a 15-minute takt time.

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C. A Market clearing algorithm can  represent grid-aware flexibility offers in reserve auction platforms, given a set of flexibility bids and grid constraints for Flanders

Partially validated: working algorithm developed and deemed scalable, but not tested at scale.

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D. We assume the cost of operating the envisioned information exchange is low enough for all parties to consider scaling up

Partially validated: the bottleneck in terms of cost is not on the messaging but significant on the telemetry & measurement cost

Our main conclusions at the end of this MVP are:

1. That the idea of conceiving and implementing a coördination mechanism over a platform such as IO.E, to optimize towards a social welfare for allocating the available LV grid bandwidth to flexibility, is technically feasible and valuable in terms of capacity unlocked on grids. We have designed and built a fully working version of the interface, leading to actual in-the-field activations using residential boilers.

2. That the costs of scaling a Soteria-style process are limited with respect to the actual messages constituting the process. The bottleneck lies in the cost of acquiring and storing the necessary measurement & telemetry data. Therefore, scaling Soteria will depend on finding an adequate balance between the amount of input data needed and bringing the uncertainty on bandwidths low enough. The faster the marginal cost of measurements decrease, the sooner such a setup becomes realistic at scale

3. That a number of challenges are ahead of us on the market design as well, due to the fact that current energy/flexibility markets were never designed with the idea of incorporating low-level, granular grid constraints. Integrating local grid constraints gives a tendency to chopping up markets geographically, whereas for the sake of liquidity, most (TSO) markets have a tendency towards unified markets of the European continent.

4. That the core question addressed (namely how to leverage residential flexibility, needed to cope with the energy transition, making optimal use of the existing capacity invested into by society) will require intense collaboration between stakeholders involved.

With an energy system on the brink of disruption, the Soteria team concludes its work even more convinced that this challenging road ahead is to be tackled by joining the skillset and perspectives of the energy system stakeholders, with a long-term outlook in mind. Together, Soteria’s partners identified 2 main barriers to implement the concept at scale.

1) the availability of LV measurements in order to calculate ‘bandwidths’ on the granularity proposed for Soteria and

2) the integration of these steps into existing market designs and timelines that are often organized on national or even EU level (for which several proposals were identified within Soteria).

While the architecture is sound for the long-term, the first required next step is identifying possible paths forward that gradually grow towards the vision that was presented by the Soteria team.