Intelligent Energy Demand Management for Appliances
The Energy Revolution needs new Innovations
The Problem
Energy is the most valuable resource of the digital society. Any key technology of the 21st century heavily relies on energy. Without energy, smartphones would not be our daily companion, or electric vehicles would not exist, just to name a few examples. Given the continuous proliferation of digital technologies, global electricity demand rose by 4% (or 900 TWh) in 2018, nearly twice as fast as overall energy demand, and at its fastest pace since 2010. By 2040 the global demand is expected to raise by 60%.
Achieving a balance between energy production and consumption is a crucial need of any energy network. Renewable capacity in the EU has increased by 71 % between 2005 and 2015. The growing presence of renewables however leads to unsteady energy production that conflicts with the demand at peak times. Energy production is often too high to keep the network frequency stable without disconnecting some solar and wind facilities. This leads to major energy losses and forced power exports to neighbouring countries (“load shedding”) at negative electricity prices, below the cost of generating the power.
In 2017 about half of Germany’s wind-based electricity production was exported. In 2018 there was a 47 TWh export surplus — sold for way less money, than the price we had to pay when importing electricity at times with shortage. This equals every 10th electron being exported for less than the costs for providing it in the first place. Neighbouring countries typically do not want this mostly unexpected power, and the German power companies must therefore pay them to get rid of the excess. This situation leads to the point, that German customers have to pick up the bill, since costs for these problems always are passed over to the private end consumer. If solar and wind power plants are disconnected from actual need in this manner, wind and solar facility owners are paid as if they had produced 90% of rated output. As well paid by the private households. In 2018 5.5 TWh were curtailed due to grid shortages. This means, that every hundredth electron that was produced in Germany was simply thrown away.
At times with low renewable electricity production conventional power plants must step in to deliver according to customer needs. This might take place over periods from one day to ten days, especially during the winter months. Hydroelectric and biofuel power can also help, but they are only able to deliver about 10% of the often very high demand, especially if it is really cold.
encentive’s Mission
Steering the energy demand with the aim to increase the impact of renewable and sustainable energies is the mission of encentive. 30% in the private domain is demanded by appliances like washing machines, driers and freezers. Up to 60% of the used energy in the business domain fuels the demand of heating as well as freezing appliances or rotating machines in general. Shifting their demand only by 15 minutes results in price reductions in the amount of 10–100%. Situations arise regularly, where the electricity prices become negative — this means nothing less, that electricity consumers are paid for using electricity.
Private household usage of washing machines and dryers demand 17 TWh electricity per year. Given that the stability regulation volume of energy transmission providers in Germany were 20 TWh in 2018, our technology could keep the German grid stable by simply incenting the energy usage behaviour. Private households are being rewarded for using the energy smart with a percentage of the revenue, saved by the energy provider.
encentive’s Solution
We are building a platform, that connects energy providers to the appliances of their customers. Every appliance manufacturer can implement our platform simply by using our encentive SDK. We provide a safe and simple API, that makes it possible to build our solution into the next generation of home appliances like dishwasher, washing machines and dryers. Their smart home capabilities let the user control them over their smartphone. They simply log in to our integrated platform through their smart home provider app, and chose the time, when their appliance has to be finished. The rest will be handled inside our platform. The user simply has two tasks to fulfil: Control the finishing time and be rewarded with savings their energy provider made trough the smarter planning and purchase of electricity at the European Energy Exchange. The feeling of the implemented encentive functionality will be the same, as e.g. the perfect embedded feeling of paypal. A simple, fast login and a time confirmation. That’s all.
The platform supplies the respective energy providers with a dashboard of their customers and their power grid location as well as their usage times they set over the smart home app. The more exact knowledge about their customers lets the energy provider safe a lot of money. The more exact load prediction and planning lets them buy electricity at the market more precisely. Further, the end consumer gets direct entry to the actual market prices, that differ over the day from 50–150%, also regularly below 0%! This way, the end-consumer will be incentivized to displace their energy usage times. This simple phenomenon that leads to lower prices consists of a lower demand, or the oversupply with regenerative energy. High prices occur, when the demand becomes too big and dirty fossil power plants have to come in to keep the grid stable. This way regenerative energy will be used by the people who paid and still pay for them — the private end consumers. The cheap electricity export will decrease as well as the expensive import at peak times. Peak times will vanish and therefore the incredible high prices for electricity, high EEG relocation charges and big grid stabilisation costs will disappear.
Another target besides the home appliances is the automotive sector, which is a big energy user who will expand its demands in the future. There is still no standard solution for the electrically powered cars load routines. Often energy provider don’t even supply cheaper charge tariffs, since most electronic cars are loading in the night, when the base load is at its minimum and wind farms have problems selling their energy, which leads to low energy prices.
Beside the private sector, the industrial sector provides many opportunities to take part in the encentive platform. Every energy-intensive step, that has a small work step puffer time, makes an advantage for energy providers. 15 minutes energy exchange trade slots can lead to way cheaper prices. Electricity is traded every 15 minutes, so their prices can vary in a vast manner every 15 minutes. The possibility of the implementation of the encentive platform still has to be examined specifically for the very process in the whole industry chain, but the low implementation barrier makes it cheap to adapt the technology, once the compatibility is tested.
The White Paragraph/ Technology
We are currently in the developing process of the first proof of concept. We are using our solely for the demands of the energy market fitted enclave architecture. The main points the architecture focuses are rapid implementation on the appliance manufacturer side, easy and intuitive registration and login for the appliance user. Further we provide exact data about the load and usage time situation on a well-structured dashboard for the energy provider.
We provide the encentive cloud, where every appliance from every manufacturer is accessible. On the other side are all energy provider, which get an overview over all their connected customers appliances. The appliance user sets the start and end time of his appliance, and the data will be sent to the encentive cloud. The energy provider will get this information in real time to plan more precisely the energy demand of their customers. Once a energy provider gets a low energy price, he requests appliances (measured in kW and kWh) for the demanded load and load consume time. Further he gets the postcode to know the location of their customer to realise a optimal grid workload. The encentive cloud will send a push notification to the appliance to let it start.
To ensure full security on all steps, we implemented different security architectures and instruments to prevent unauthorised access from third parties. The connection between the encentive cloud and the appliances, respectively the mobile app the appliance it is connected to, is secured with a JWT-Token to prevent unauthorised users to access the encentive service. Only parties which got the token officially trough a appliance/ user registration, can access the encentive service.
The dashboard, which creates an overview for the energy provider, is protected trough SSL/ TLS, to prevent third parties from getting or manipulating the information about the encentive load pool or the request of the energy provider. Every energy provider gets their exclusive login data trough a safe registration and authorisation process.
From the architecture built on, we focus on maximum scalability. We make sure to build the proof of concept with the focus on easy high scaling, once more and more user participate on our platform.
Competitors
Related competitors provide boxes which connect the central electrical connection to the box provider. The box provider can be an energy or a service provider which collects the data for energy provider. There are currently no competitors in the private household area for the automatic load control by energy providers. We don’t need any boxes, since we provide an embedded platform into any appliance you can think of.
Competitors in the industrial sector also use the box approach, but they mostly use the connected loads and supplies to participate in the control energy market, which helps to guarantee the grid stability. We do not focus on this control energy market.
Our Unique Selling Proposition
We provide a low barrier implementation. This means, that no extra hardware like remote control boxes or smart meters are needed. We use the smart home approaches of the appliance manufacturers. Further we obviate energy storage solution like batteries or heat water reservoirs. Since we promote the smart energy usage at times when green energy is provided, there is no need to store the energy.
We are hundreds of euros cheaper, because the box approaches have to be paid by the end consumer. The implementation of the platform into home appliances and the provision of the dashboard for the energy provider demands only a small part of the costs a box would evoke.
We are rewarding: We incentivise users to use their electricity smart. Intrinsic and Extrinsic incentives, based on behavioural, scientific research lead to better demand predictions and therefore to lower prices for the energy provider as well as for the end consumer.
9 to 5 work is not fit for the future — analogue energy neither
We provide not only a platform to connect the energy user with the energy provider. We provide the solution for a stable grid, capable of using all the green energy we already produce. Smarter energy usage with better planning possibilities lead to incredible high cost savings, and we make sure everybody receives their usage in the system fairly distributed. We do nothing more than to clear the way for a smart and clean world the next generations will be proud of — encentive.
