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Smart energy communities could be a ‘game-changer’ in the transition to renewables, says SETU’s Sean Lyons.
We all know how important big solar farms and onshore and offshore wind farms are in the increasingly urgent transition from fossil fuels to renewable energies, but what about small, smart energy parks?
The idea behind these small energy parks is that you put energy generation as close as possible to where it is used.
Sean Lyons gives the example of an industrial park with 50 companies. None of these hypothetical companies is big enough to develop renewables on its own but together there is enough energy demand to develop a small energy park.
Now, Lyons says, it makes sense to develop a renewable energy park with wind, solar and batteries to suit what he calls the “energy load profile” of the combined companies. This site will have a smart software system that can predict and optimise energy use and storage to suit the day-to-day needs of the businesses connected to the park.
In this way, you’re bringing more renewables online and easing the pressure on the country’s electricity grid through balancing the load of your energy park, thereby reducing the amount of redundancy (back-up energy) that needs to be built into the system.
You’re also decreasing cost and waste because customers don’t have to pay for the energy to be brought potentially hundreds of miles from where it is generated in a journey that itself results in energy loss.
In more good news, Lyons says, the copper is already in the ground so a project like this doesn’t require radical updates to the grid system already in place.
Lyons works at the Walton Institute in South East Technological University (SETU). He is an engineer by trade and describes himself as “having a keen interest in the clean-energy transition and renewable energy”.
“And trying to do something about the world before it burns to a crisp I suppose,” he says.
“I would be very much the renewable energy guy among the software engineers here.”
Lyons is the technical lead on the smart grid research being undertaken at the institute, where they focus on the ‘smart software’ aspect of the energy parks.
“I’d be very much out in the market, looking at what’s happening, what needs to be done, what regulatory changes are happening, what’s needed to make this clean-energy transition happen and how.”
Energy communities
Lyons says that the Walton Institute really focuses on how to bring about practical improvements fast.
“Some people think of R and D [research and development], that we’re just doing blue-sky research, but a lot of what we do is very market-focused, applied research.
“It’s small r, big D you know.”
Lyons bemoans the slow pace of change when it comes to the clean-energy transition in Ireland. Though he’s quick to acknowledge that it’s a complex task and a lot of good work has been done, he had thought recent EU directives would speed things up a bit faster.
In 2019, the EU updated its energy policy framework with the aim of delivering on its Paris Agreement commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
The legislation includes the objective for member states to create “energy communities”.
“Energy communities allow local communities to join forces and invest in clean energy,” the EU says.
“Acting as a single entity means energy communities can access all suitable energy markets on a level-playing field with other market actors. Under EU law, energy communities can take the form of any legal entity including an association, a cooperative, a partnership, a non-profit organisation or a limited liability company.”
The EU, Lyons says, has come to understand in recent years that to have a clean-energy transition, “we need to have huge renewables, big wind farms and so on, but we also need to bring the energy citizen along with us”.
Part of the EU legislation is peer-to-peer energy sharing, which, Lyons explains, would enable the small energy park to legally share energy.
Piloting the parks
Currently, Ireland’s energy system is “unidirectional” – energy flows from major sources of generation to consumers, and EirGrid and the ESB are the only entities which can control it, Lyons explains. Whereas with the introduction of smart energy systems, the energy would be bi-directional. “You’ve now got energy flowing both ways and you’re trying to balance it.
“Obviously it’s a big change,” Lyons says.
While the Irish Government undertakes the complex task of transposing the EU energy directives into Irish law, Lyons and his team have been running pilot projects to show how these smart energy parks would work in practice.
They developed software platforms using data analytics and machine learning to create prediction systems to optimise energy generation and storage. Thousands of data points go into predicting localised renewable energy generation including weather forecasts, solar sensors, wind direction and many others, with machine learning networks used to predict demand.
“Loads of stuff goes into the model,” Lyons says. “And obviously the more historical data you have, the better your future models will be.”
One project Lyons worked on involved setting up two virtual energy parks for the Dingle Peninsula. They found that even just with small solar energy development, you could make the area more than 50pc sustainable. They also accounted for increased demand as people transition to electric vehicles and electrified heating, and found that you could treble the load on the grid system and it still wouldn’t need to be upgraded.
Lyons and the team are now using that technology for Satcomm, a three-year project involving 11 partners to set up energy communities in Ireland, France, Portugal and Spain. These countries have been quicker than Ireland to transpose the EU energy directives so the pilots on the continent are real rather than virtual. Every country has developed different rules and mechanisms and all of those differences will challenge the smart system to be flexible and make it better.
“Rather than the software systems that we’ve built sitting on a shelf waiting for the Irish legislators and regulators to catch up, we’re going to be doing, through Satcomm, these energy communities and energy parks in other countries,” Lyons says.
“And we’re also going to be doing another virtual pilot in Ireland, with the hope that when they do catch up that, you know, we have all the data and everything else ready to go.”
Conducting these pilots is the most effective way to develop a solution that works, Lyons says.
“That’s what R and D is about, you know, because you can’t implement these things and just hope for the best.
“You have to do these pilots and ask what happens if … how would you set the capacity limits and how do you set the size that energy community can become and how do you set the size of the batteries and the solar within it and all those things.”
These are not trivial changes, he says. As well as technical questions are issues of who pays for and who saves from smart system upgrades and what kind of energy system would be fair as well as clean.
“But the steps to answer all of those questions is to do it in a pilot format and learn by doing.”
And it is an effort that Lyons believes will really pay off in transitioning to renewables.
“These energy parks, energy communities could be a game-changer … I’m not saying it’s the only piece of the jigsaw, but it is a piece of the jigsaw that could make a big difference.”
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