Greater flexibility for system decarbonization
Renewable energies undoubtedly have many advantages that we should be able to take advantage of, however, there is the disadvantage of their intermittency. That is, we may need energy at times when the production of, for example, a photovoltaic plant, is not sufficient to supply the needs of consumers.
Currently, there are no storage or battery resources available that can provide medium and large-scale solutions to this intermittency. Therefore, in order to become more and better independent from fossil fuels, we need the consumer to take an active role and the system to prepare for a change in the way we consume and distribute energy resources, coordinating consumption with production.
This is where the concept of flexibility comes into play, and its importance for the decarbonization of the system.
FlexCHESS Project
In this context, the new FlexCHESS project has emerged, which aims to revolutionize the energy storage model through the development of multilevel flexibility, based on virtual storage systems of surplus energy through hybrid energy storage systems, modifying their behavior to adjust to unforeseen variations in demand, climate and market.
This pioneering system consists of storing both thermal energy and electrical energy to increase the consumer's supply capacity, which will improve the consumer's flexibility and adaptation to the grid.
The solution proposed by FlexCHESS also ensures their interoperability and improves the innovation capacity and competitiveness of SMEs and Startups in Europe by unlocking access to meaningful information and co-creating new business opportunities.
The specific objectives of the project are to develop an interoperable solution, easy to implement, that will reduce the payback period by 30% with a payback of less than 4 years, and that will be able to improve demand forecasting (accuracy >80%) by adapting the operation of hybrid storage systems accordingly. This solution will also facilitate the integration of renewable energies into the energy system.
To do so, the project will be funded by the European Union's Horizon Europe Research and Innovation Program with a project end date of November 2025.
The FlexCHESS project consortium brings together three universities, two large companies, three distributors, four SMEs and two NGOs from different European countries. In addition, FlexCHESS will define different scenarios in order to validate and evaluate the proposed solutions in five pilots in Spain, Italy, Slovenia, Wales and Turkey.
The Spanish pilot : Energy Community of Bullas
The Spanish FlexCHESS pilot is located in Bullas (Murcia) within the Local Energy Community where MIWenergía together with La Solar will deploy the project solution in order to test its tools and thus facilitate the implementation of the Energy Communities, to later extend the solution to all members of the community in Bullas.
In the first phase of the pilot the participants are composed of offices, hotels, a medical center, a city hall building that has self-consumption with batteries and fifteen residential users of which six of them have photovoltaic self-consumption installations and three of them also have batteries.
Since its beginnings in 2013, MIWenergía has already added eleven innovation projects European-scale innovation projects behind it. Currently, six of these projects are in development and study phases, two others are in the final stages of evaluation of the solutions deployed, in addition to those that will begin in the coming months.
