shared energy storage Archives

Load limiting as a solution to reduce Load Shedding

In our ongoing exploration of strategies to combat load shedding, we turn our attention to a practical yet powerful tool: load limiting. As part of our series aimed at unraveling the complexities of load shedding and offering tangible solutions, we delve into how load limiting can mitigate the impact of electricity shortages on both consumers and the grid itself.

Understanding Load Limiting:

Load limiting, in essence, is a controlled restriction imposed by utilities on electricity consumption during periods of strained generation capacity. If you were to take electricity as being analogous to water, while load shedding involves shutting off the tap entirely, load limiting is akin to allowing a restricted flow of water. So, the utility is able to reduce your supply parameters while still giving you some supply. It’s an inconvenience, yes, but far preferable to a complete outage. Importantly, load limiting allows for selective preservation of essential infrastructure, such as traffic lights and streetlights, ensuring vital services remain operational even during challenging times.

The Role of Smart Technology:

Load limiting is typically facilitated by smart meters or smart end points specifically designed for this purpose. These intelligent devices not only enable utilities to manage consumption efficiently but also offer a range of added benefits for both the utility and end users. From providing real-time energy usage data to facilitating dynamic pricing models, smart technology transforms the way we interact with electricity, promoting conservation and cost-effectiveness.

Benefits Beyond Convenience:

For those involved in the supply side of the equation, load limiting presents a boon. By curbing consumption without completely shutting down, utilities can still sell energy, albeit at reduced rates, during peak demand periods. This demand response mechanism not only stabilizes the grid but also offers financial incentives for generators.

Moreover, load limiting strategically targets low voltage networks, sparing medium voltage infrastructure from excessive strain. This preservation effort is critical, as aging medium voltage infrastructure is already stretched beyond its design limits due to frequent load shedding.

Conclusion:

As we continue our journey to demystify load shedding and explore viable solutions, load limiting emerges as a pragmatic response to electricity shortages. It balances the need to avoid a total grid collapse as explained in our introductory article with the imperative of maintaining essential services and infrastructure. Through load limiting, we not only alleviate the burden on the national grid but also pave the way for a more resilient and sustainable energy future, empowered by smart technology and forward-thinking approaches to energy management.

Talk to us to find out more and let’s make a difference to our future ourselves.

25 May 2023: Sithembiso Mhlongo, 24, assisting to ease the traffic during a loashedding outage on Sandile Thusi Road in Durban. Photo: SANDILE NDLOVU

Control

Exciting product launch for residential and commercial shared spaces

agile digital is proud to announce the launch of the Energy Share Unit.

Proudly developed in South Africa out of a need identified by leading Solar EPC’s and Specialists who found that in high density residential, commercial and industrial spaces it becomes a major challenge to equitably share industrial-sized energy storage solutions.

They found that there are serious risks when constructing and specifying a shared energy storage solution for multiple users. The major risks identified are potential abuse by some tenants and the inability for the solar inverter and battery system to control and reduce loads to a granular level across multiple distinct distribution boards.

Out of this challenge the ESU was born. It provides a novel approach to the distribution network and marries traditional smart metering with powerful control algorithms to ensure a robust solution that is reliable and repeatable. The system was developed to be flexible and can be user-configured to ensure that in a commercial environment anchor tenants who contribute the most towards the shared energy storage system are granted the lion’s share of the resource while still providing smaller users a fair share of the overall capacity.

This process is seamless, and the same algorithms developed for commercial and industrial installations lend themselves extremely well to residential applications.

Please click here and submit your details and we will be glad to help ensure your solar and battery system benefits your users for many years providing reliable and equitable use to all.

Control

Why hasn’t your apartment installed solar yet?

Managing a body corporate in South Africa is no trivial task and trustees are constantly being challenged by owners of a section in scheme.

One of the common demands over the last few years is the deployment of renewable energy generation to assist with immunity from load shedding. However solar panels and inverters alone are insufficient to deal with the issue. Grid-tied inverters, by design, are not able to generate without the presence of the grid and therefore during load shedding all the impressive panels on the shared roof space are unfortunately rendered useless.

Of course, this is where hybrid inverters come into their own which, when paired with batteries are able to see the grid disconnection and continue to supply essential loads through their UPS load functionality.
This is great but what happens when we need to have this UPS function deal with hundreds of individual apartments. Essentially two scenarios are possible with many solar installers and consulting engineers following the first route of having individual inverters and batteries per apartment. While this is logical it loses out in three main areas:

Economies of scale, ie a large inverter (and similarly battery) is always going to be more cost effective than multiple smaller inverters (and batteries in a similar way)
Extremely difficult, if not, impossible to install solar to such multiple numbers of inverters in a practical and neat fashion
Backup support will always be less effective for multiple small inverters and batteries versus large industrial-sized inverters and batteries. Suppliers employ higher skilled technicians and support for their industrial units by their nature.

The other more effective, of the two scenarios is having this large-scale industrial inverter and containerized battery solution which benefits from the points above. However, two distinct disadvantages arise when you have a centralized system such as this:

Potential abuse from one or more tenants with large loads draining batteries while other tenants never get to benefit from their investment in the shared battery.
Complex distribution wiring since the multiple sub-distribution boards in the apartment block need to have their large loads reduced when running on batteries.

At agile digital we have developed a novel solution that integrates smart metering, automation philosophy and real-time analytics to deal with both of these issues. Our Energy Share Unit ensures an equitable share of the battery per apartment so no tenant may abuse the capacity to the detriment of another tenant.

We also ensure real-time load management to reduce the large appliances such as geysers, stoves and air-conditioning which nobody can afford to drain the battery during extended load shedding outages. This is done seamlessly across the entire building. To create visibility for tenants we also provide a mobile friendly chatbot to always update the tenant on how their virtual slice of the large battery is being used and provide some outlook on when they may run out of the battery.

When partnered with a long-term power purchase agreement and installed as part of the initial solar and battery system this provides users with effectively lower costs than their municipal energy tariff whilst having all the benefits of a hybrid solar inverter with storage.

With our solution more tenants will be asking their body corporates why they haven’t moved to solar yet.

August 2, 2023

Load limiting as a solution to reduce Load Shedding

Exciting product launch for residential and commercial shared spaces

Why hasn’t your apartment installed solar yet?

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