Image: © erikrous/Stock.adobe.com
Cenergise’s Chloe Kinsella discusses an SEAI-funded project that aims to help homeowners reduce their electricity bills.
Ireland’s electricity demands are increasing at a rapid pace, particularly with the number of data centres housed here. Across Europe, electricity prices continue to rise due to the ongoing demand.
With this in mind, there are many projects, platforms and start-ups that seek to address the challenges around electricity prices and increasing grid demands, including Cenergise.
Cenergise is an energy trading and services company based in Dublin. Under its umbrella, it has two separate companies – a proprietary trading company and a client services and supply company.
The proprietary trading company builds detailed models to forecast the price of electricity, which changes constantly. It then buys or sells depending on its calculation of the fair value price.
“In the client services company, we trade on behalf of wind farms, demand side units, supply companies and other generators. We are also a registered electricity supplier in the retail market in Ireland,” said Chloe Kinsella, who set up Cenergise in 2013.
Earlier this year, Cenergise was awarded an R&D grant from the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland (SEAI) for a project that aims to demonstrate a smart domestic platform.
Kinsella said the company’s understanding of all aspects of electricity from generation and trading through to supply puts it in the right position for this project.
“This project demonstrates that huge savings can be made by integrating solar panels, batteries, an optimiser and a dynamic electricity tariff,” said Kinsella. “The cost to charge an EV with an optimiser and dynamic tariff is significantly cheaper than a petrol or diesel car. The project also shows how a house battery and solar panels can power a house off-grid during power cuts.”
The Cenergise platform integrates with two main devices, an inverter controlling the house battery and a car charger. The platform feeds in a dynamic half-hour price of electricity to determine the cheapest time to charge the car and the house battery.
The homeowner receives an alert showing the cheapest days to plug in the EV and the platform will then remotely charge the car at the cheapest time once the car is plugged in.
For the house battery, the platform will forecast the solar production and house demand for the next day. If the house demand is greater than the solar production, the Cenergise platform will remotely schedule the inverter to charge the house battery at the cheapest time. This means the house will run off the battery during the day in self-supply mode and pull from the grid where needed.
According to Kinsella, the biggest challenge to scale the project is integrating with each device in the home, with each having separate interfaces. “With some devices we can communicate with them directly via API, while others, we need to install a hardwire connection,” she said.
“In the future, we expect all car chargers and inverters will have API interfaces that can be programmed with dynamic tariffs easily and will offer homeowners the most flexibility. However, in the absence of this, we are working with a combination of hardwire and API connections.”
Kinsella said the Cenergise platform can help homeowners reduce their electricity bills but it can also be used to help balance the grid. “Currently windfarms are being turned off (curtailed) when there is more wind generation on the system than demand,” she said.
“This platform can be used to reduce wind curtailment by scheduling car and battery charging to increase demand, when prices are very cheap. Overall, this means that Ireland is getting the most out of its renewables and reducing dependencies on foreign fuel imports, and hence price shocks caused by wars.”
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