More information on Smart Energy Hubs

Why are energy hubs necessary?

Demand for electricity is growing rapidly. More and more companies want to become more sustainable, switch to electric vehicles, and generate their own energy using solar panels or wind turbines. This is in addition to companies’ growth ambitions. At the same time, we’re hearing more and more often that the power grid is at capacity. As a result, expanding operations with new machinery or charging stations is becoming impossible in more and more places.

Our power grid is simply not designed to handle all these new consumers and producers. Grid expansion cannot keep pace with growth, resulting in waiting lists for companies seeking additional capacity. Especially during peak hours, the grid has already reached its maximum capacity in many places.

An energy hub is one of the collective solutions for addressing this challenge. By collaborating locally with other companies, you can intelligently coordinate energy use and available grid capacity. This helps reduce peak demand and makes smarter use of periods of low demand on the grid.

What is an energy hub?
 

An energy hub is a collaboration between companies and organizations to manage their local energy supply. The companies intelligently coordinate energy generation, storage, and consumption within the available capacity of the power grid. Rather than each company individually drawing energy from and feeding it back into the grid, participants within a hub jointly manage their energy consumption and generation. This prevents overloading the power grid and allows the companies to collectively make efficient use of their available energy sources. Because they produce and use energy locally, an energy hub contributes to a smarter, more reliable, and more sustainable energy system.

What are the benefits of an energy hub for you?
 

• Greater potential for growth and sustainability: By working together, you can make smarter use of the power grid, creating opportunities for growth and sustainability.
• Save money by investing together: Share investments (such as a community battery) that you can all use together.
• Save on emergency power costs: By purchasing energy from each other locally, you reduce the likelihood that you’ll have to use (expensive) emergency power.
• Reliable Energy Supply: Growth within existing contracts could lead to grid overloads during peak times in the future. By coordinating efforts at the local level, you can work together to build a transparent and reliable energy supply system that prevents this from happening.
• Sustainable Business Together: By working together and matching supply with local demand, we create more opportunities to develop and fully utilize local renewable energy sources. Your neighbor’s solar panels can power your charging station.
• New revenue models: New assets, such as energy storage or additional flexibility, also open up new development opportunities for you.