Enexis Netbeheer and Info Support Pilot Incentives to Reduce Peak Load

With the advance of renewably generated energy, electricity supply and demand are becoming less and less predictable. The supply of electricity from renewable sources such as wind and solar is highly weather-dependent and therefore difficult to predict. Actually, the same applies to the demand for electricity. As more and more electric cars arrive, you often see a peak occur when the owners of these cars return home and start charging the car at the same time. In addition, homes are increasingly being heated electrically which leads to peaks when residents are home. The job of grid operators is to manage all this and keep supply and demand in balance.

At the same time, network operators must keep an eye on costs and ensure that they are not unnecessary. These costs are largely determined by the peak load; after all, the network must be adjusted accordingly. By reducing the peak load, the social costs can be kept as low as possible.

To find out which tools Enexis Netbeheer can use to achieve this, the company and Info Support conducted a pilot project among 255 employees. The six-month pilot examined the extent to which a financial incentive leads to behavioral change. The aim was to achieve better power distribution and thus lower grid load.

What was special was that the pilot used the MYenergyinsight portal and the underlying backend landscape. Info Support had previously developed both for Enpuls, a division of Enexis Netbeheer. With data from MYenergyinzicht, it was possible to keep participants informed of their current energy consumption per quarter-hour.

As of March 2019, Info Support was part of a multidisciplinary team. With a clear scope, the project team set to work building the architecture and making the portal suitable. Every two weeks a check was performed to make sure everything was going according to schedule. In the end, in (only) five sprints-a total of 10 weeks-everything was delivered according to the deliverables, costs and deadlines.

To ensure that the software is easy to expand, a scalable software architecture with a modular design was chosen. This allows scaling up or down in the backend depending on the needs of Enexis Netbeheer. This used an MVC architecture in .NET Core with Azure Blob Storage as a caching layer. The stored data is calculated in the backend and then stored in Azure Blob Storage. Thus, all data is immediately available for real-time analysis. Choosing this application eliminates the need for an external database. In addition, this way the data is immediately put into the correct format without the need for manual operations. At the same time, a modular design was chosen so that it is easy to create a new or custom front end.