UK’s electricity networks the smartest and most flexible in Europe
Kiwi Power has been a leading contributor to the UK flexibility market for over a decade.
Learn why the UK’s flexibility services are ahead of every other country in Europe in this Energy Networks Association article.
A fully flexible energy system could cut cost of reaching net zero by £16.7bn a year in 2050.
This is the most significant finding from the Flexibility in Great Britain report, launched today by the Carbon Trust. It is the most in-depth analysis carried out to-date on the role flexibility plays within the energy system.
The analysis, carried out by the Carbon Trust and supported by Professor Goran Strbac from Imperial College London, delivers a robust and up-to-date evidence-base on the role and value of flexibility in a net zero system. It is expected to have profound implications for policymakers, households and the wider energy sector across Great Britain.
Key findings of the report confirm Kiwi Power’s assertions that energy flexibility provides the triple win of carbon reduction, grid resiliency and additional revenue to energy asset owners. The Carbon Trust takes this position further as the report provides a whole system view:
- Embedding greater flexibility across the entire energy system will reduce the cost of achieving net zero for all consumers while assuring energy security.
- Investing in flexibility is a no-regrets decision as it has the potential to deliver material net savings of up to £16.7bn per annum across all scenarios analysed in 2050.
- A more flexible system will accelerate the benefits of decarbonisation supported by decentralisation and digitalisation.
- To maximise the benefits of flexibility, households and businesses should play an active role in the development and operation of the country’s future energy system as energy use for transport, heat and appliances becomes more integrated.
- Policymakers should preserve existing flexibility options and act now to maximise future flexibility, such as by building it into ‘smart’ appliances or building standards.
Kiwi Power provided industry insight and feedback to the project team as part of a cross-sectoral group, including: Bryt Energy, EDF, Greater London Authority, IGEM, Low Carbon Contracts Company, SBM Offshore, SP Energy Networks, Statera Energy, Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks (SSEN), UK Power Networks and Western Power Distribution.
Jay Zoellner, Kiwi Power’s CEO, will be discussing energy flexibility within the UK energy system as part of an industry panel at the Carbon Trust Net Zero Energy Transition Week.
Read the Flexibility in Great Britain report.
Join Jay at the Carbon Trust Net Zero Energy Transition Week panel.
In 2020, Kiwi Power transitioned into an energy technology company, licensing its award winning technology – Kiwi Core – to all energy players. Kiwi Core is a true mixed-asset distributed energy platform that enables clients of all sizes, in any market, to join the flexibility markets with confidence. The company allows everyone to positively impact the global energy transition, not just the big players.
Last year, Kiwi Power launched in North America with ENGIE as its first software client and expanded its software customer list in Europe. In the UK, its headquarters, Kiwi Core technology is now the engine powering a first of its kind collaboration between four of the six major UK distributed network operators under the brand Flexible Power. Since the addition of Kiwi Power’s new CEO Jay Zoellner in September 2019, Kiwi Power management has turned decidedly toward the future.
Meet the most talented flexible energy management team in the industry!
JAN YDENS, Global Head of Product
Jan joined Kiwi Power to help scale its unique cloud based energy flexibility platform. He has more than 25 years of experience as a technology executive in enterprise software for the energy space. Thirteen of those years were with ABB’s Enterprise Software Product Group. Jan’s expertise is ideally matched for the pivot Kiwi Power is making since he also brings experience from corporate leadership roles in Sales & Marketing, Presales, Consulting, Development Management, Product Management and General Management. He has a Master’s in Computer Science, completed the MIT Executive Education in AI for Business Strategy, and holds a number of patents in the AI space.
AMY WILSON, Head of Marketing & Communications
Kiwi Power’s vision includes making an impact on global sustainability. Amy’s 14 years of strategic marketing experience includes marketing leadership roles at The Carbon Trust, Builtvisible and Sift Digital. Kiwi Power enables any customer to “lean-in” to the flexible energy market and Amy leads the company’s marketing and press initiatives for the company’s vision and mission. She brings fresh energy, insights and methods to product marketing for the Kiwi Core platform, creative content creation, and the company’s brand and website. Kiwi Power extracts the value in flexible energy markets for its client.Through expert messaging and content, Amy helps clients and partners understand how the company helps them.
MARK DUKE, Finance Director
A seasoned finance director, Mark joined Kiwi Power to prepare the company’s financial and administrative systems for the scale associated with a software licensing business. Mark’s 30 years experience working at global companies in the technology and professional services sectors and his recent energy technology company IPO experience on the Australian Stock Exchange as CFO is a valuable addition to the leadership team. Kiwi Power is growing and Mark’s expertise will help ensure the company has the proper resources to meet client needs effectively.
ADAM GILBEY, Global Head of Sales
Kiwi Power’s pivot to selling licenses for its disruptive flexible energy platform, Kiwi Core, attracted Adam’s 20+ years of software sales experience to the team. His strong experience selling software licenses to an abundance of business sectors is a seamless fit. Kiwi Core technology is globally distributed in all sectors including, but not limited to, utility, water, food, industrial and commercial sectors for flexible energy purposes. Previous roles includeVice President of Sales for Northern EMEA at Qlik Technologies and other sales organizations across the UK, Benelux and Nordics.
LEANNE WALSHAM, Head of Talent & Business Management
Leanne has been a leader for several years at Kiwi Power and her expertise clearly merited an empowered role on the management team. She leads core business functions, including talent management, health & safety, quality management, corporate social responsibility, security and compliance. She helps recruit virtually all new team members that are now guiding Kiwi Power through this business model pivot, and helps Kiwi Power’s leaders continue to motivate and retain top quality talent.
GAVIN SALLERY, Chief Technology Officer
Gavin has led Kiwi Power’s technology transformation for the past 4 years, taking it from a localised means of DSR aggregation implementation into a globally capable flexible energy platform. His 25 years of technology experience continues to lead Kiwi Power’s in-house technology development, expanding on Kiwi Power’s award-winning hardware and software portfolio.
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The new team has made Kiwi Power’s transition to an energy technology company a successful one. Kiwi Power has received abundant interest from clients globally and was awarded the Grid Edge Award for 2020 by S&P Global Platts. As the company kicks off 2021, the leadership team is in full gear to deploy the Kiwi Core platform, enabling customer participation and confidence in the new energy world.
To find out more about Kiwi Power’s shift towards a software licensing model click here.
It’s been an interesting year for the UK’s energy system, and one in which a glimpse of a decarbonised future was seen. Demand patterns changed, new flexibility measures were introduced and renewables saw more records broken.
Thomas Jennings recently spoke to Alice Grundy about the most important flexibility developments to happen this year and what 2021 may shape up to look like. While the conversation is captured below, the full interview was published by Current± on 23rd December 2020.
With COVID-19 changing demand alongside new flexibility measures being brought in, 2020 has been a unique year for flexibility. What has it been like to navigate the situation?
One of the things it’s really demonstrated to me is just how important the flexibility that exists across the network is as we move towards a renewable net zero system. There was still this reliance on the centralised generation, but then COVID-19 came in and it just screwed the demand curve. Suddenly you’ve got this situation where National Grid is working on creating new markets, introducing Optional Downward Flexibility Management (ODFM), and looking at decentralised flexible generation across the network. From Kiwi Power’s point of view that’s really exciting because it just shows what a huge role we have to play in moving to net zero and meeting the UK’s sustainability goals.
We’ve seen the growth of FFR, we’ve seen the introduction of Dynamic Containment and we’ve got various other Dynamic services being rolled out. From that point of view, I think it’s extremely exciting to be able to increasingly offer access to those services. I tend to be quite bullish in how I see these things, but then that’s why I work in this sector – because I genuinely believe it’s going to be such a massive, massive growth area.
What do you think the last impacts of 2020 will be when it comes to flexibility?
It’s been a hugely positive year with regards to the power sector from the point of view of the learnings achieved. I think it’s been so, so useful to be able to sit here and go actually, I understand how the market’s going to change, how it’s going to evolve and so from that point of view, I think it’s been a hugely valuable year. We’ve grown that confidence that we can rely increasingly on the flexibility that’s embedded within the network and move away from the high emitting, centralised generation.
What are you most proud of Kiwi Power achieving in 2020?
It’s got to be going into the US. Let’s not beat around the bush; the US is the biggest market in the world when it comes to what we do and so moving into the US is absolutely huge for us.
A lot is going on in the UK and I genuinely believe that we are leaders globally when it comes to power markets. I’ve got to give credit to National Grid here – the fact that we are leading the market, the fact that we’re doing so many innovative things puts us on that basis for which we can expand. ODFM is one sort of great example of that with how quickly they developed and rolled that out. You’ve got all these great markets, and it’s really, really exciting to be able to take that knowledge and share it globally.
It’s been a great year. It’s been a year where we’ve had lots of new developments, we’ve grown in Europe and what I’m particularly pleased about is that COVID-19 hasn’t slowed us down.
How do you anticipate flexibility and the energy system evolving in 2021?
More and more flexibility is going to come to the market. I think it’s about empowering those that have got the generators sitting on their sites to deliver and provide that flexibility to the ESOs for the countries that they operate within. It’s about taking a distributed energy model and showing what it can do from a net zero and sustainability point of view, but also from the point of view of the fact that the power market isn’t this grossly complicated behemoth – there’s a simple route to market to monetise the assets that you have under your management. It’s really going to be an opening up and democratising of the power markets as more and more people engage and start increasing the flexibility that’s available.
Kiwi Power are delighted to announce a partnership with Creating Tomorrow’s Forests, a UK-based company dedicated to planting trees in the optimal way to maximise biodiversity and capture carbon.
The forestry team will plant a tree for every Kiwi Power colleague, client and customer at a new Somerset location: Charlotte’s Wood.
Following the Miyawaki Method, saplings are planted at high densities to ensure fast yet sustainable growth, restoring biodiversity as quickly as possible. The team focus on creating naturally diverse landscapes, with trees, shrubs and wildflowers. At Charlotte’s Wood, bat boxes, bird boxes, hibernacula, wildflower meadow plants and aquatic marginal plants are all incorporated into the low lying land plot to create a complete ecosystem.
Amy Wilson commented:
It felt important to invest in local afforestation for our staff, and to honour our commitment to sustainability in a small way. We will continue to work with Creating Tomorrow’s Forests by planting additional trees in the new year and look forward to a site visit when travel restrictions ease.
Having planted 8 million trees over the past six years, Creating Tomorrow’s Forests have their sights set on reaching 10 million over the next year.
Kiwi Power is delighted to play a supportive role in the multi-DNO collaboration announced today in The Energyst.
Western Power Distribution, SP Energy Networks, Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks and Northern Powergrid are collaborating on Flexible Power to signpost and operate all of their flexibility requirements.
Based on its established Flexible Power cooperation with Western Power Distribution, Kiwi Power provides its Virtual Power Plant (VPP) software to the four Distribution Network Operators for them operate all their flexibility requirements. It enables flexibility providers to directly participate in local grid constraint management services on multiple networks. Flexibility providers will be able to declare their assets’ availability, receive dispatch signals and view performance and settlement reports.
Stephan Marty, Chief Commercial Officer of Kiwi Power, said:
“We are very excited to announce our cooperation with these four leading UK distribution network operators which allows distributed energy resources to be utilised to provide flexibility to local grids.
This is a key enabling ingredient for the energy transition and the UK’s Net Zero carbon target by allowing a more efficient management of grid constraints thereby enabling more renewable generation and electric vehicles to be connected to the grid.
Deploying our proven VPP software for this application is another key step for distributed energy resources to provide flexibility to UK electricity system.”
Visit the Flexible Power website to find out more about the project.
Kiwi Power, a leading global energy technology company that is simplifying distributed energy, has today commissioned the final 5MW of battery storage at South Somerset District Council’s (SSDC) ground-breaking site at Fideoak Mill in Taunton.
The additional £2.5m investment brings the site’s total capacity to 30MW, the UK’s largest council-owned battery storage site. Kiwi Power’s proprietary hardware, Fruit, was installed on all 22 battery units so that the site can provide grid balancing services to National Grid.
“Councils across the UK are seeking to make the most out of their sustainability and carbon emissions investments as they seek to meet increasingly stringent targets. Landmark projects such as Fideoak are vital for demonstrating how investments in battery storage and renewables are value adding and income generating” Thomas Jennings, Head of Optimisation said.
“With rapidly changing market dynamics, SSDC will be relying on our co-optimisation team to ensure that the £12m asset always participates in the right market at the right time so that it delivers the maximum return possible for the investment” Jennings added.
David Owen, Director of Opium Power said: “Our partnership with South Somerset District Council and Kiwi Power has worked extremely well. The 30MW Taunton Battery Energy Storage System is the first of several very exciting joint ventures with local authorities and private sector investors that Opium Power is progressing to deliver stability to a sustainably powered grid.
“We currently have an additional 110MW in design and build on three new battery storage systems, and we intend to work with Kiwi Power on all of them.
“The UK has already accepted that we must adapt our electricity generation system to be carbon zero compliant by the use of renewables, and indeed the Government has legislated for it. Grid scale battery storage is the essential required component to stabilise the inherently unstable and non-dispatchable energy generated by solar and wind.”
In June, Kiwi Power commissioned the first 25MW of the project in just four days. The final phase of the project – a further 5MW in capacity – has now also been commissioned. In total, 67 Fruits are synchronised together so that the site can participate in any of the UK’s 15 flexibility markets.
“We were able to commission the site in record time despite COVID-19 disruption” Alistair Lowe, Head of Hardware at Kiwi Power said. “Relying on our proprietary hardware and VPP platform, along with a simulator that we built to test the code, we have been able to automate much of the commissioning and perform it remotely instead.”
The site is unusual in the fact that the site controller must be able to simultaneously shut off all batteries with immediate effect in response to a constraint signal from Western Power Distribution. To facilitate this, Kiwi Power developed a solution based on its proprietary technology that could interpret the incoming signal and simultaneous dispatch it to each of the 22 units on site. Complete synchronicity was key to ensuring proper management. By adapting the existing infrastructure, site completion continued without delay or additional cost to the client.
Last week, the leading international consultancy Navigant published a report detailing the leading global Virtual Power Plant (VPP) Platform Providers in 2020. The report analyses and assesses the key attributes needed to be a successful VPP, including company vision, market strategy and its partners. This report updates Navigant’s previous research report on the VPP market conducted in 2016.
Kiwi Power was named as one of 4 global leaders in the Virtual Power Plant (VPP) market, placing the company firmly as an expert in the DER field, providing excellence to its customers. In particular, Navigant outlined Kiwi Power’s strong relationship with Engie as being key to its market position, as well as the ability to capture a large cross-section of the value chain (scoring the highest of all companies surveyed), due to offering metering, device controls and battery management. This has resulted in being active at over 800 sites, representing 1 GW in 10 countries offering DR, peak load management, and frequency regulation grid services.
Kiwi Power’s market leading DER Management Platform (VPP), ‘Loom’, is designed for Utilities, Aggregators, Asset owners and Battery operators. It has been successfully deployed in a wide range of use cases, including static, dynamic and economic demand response, BTM & FOM batteries, primary, secondary, tertiary ancillary services, capacity markets, power trading applications, peak shaving and price arbitrage. Loom is a cloud-based Virtual Power Plant (VPP) and Energy Management System platform with best-in-class technical features, such as a proprietary low-cost modular hardware solution (Fruit) for local connectivity, monitoring and metering, aggregation of static and dynamic assets, optimal portfolio based dispatching, battery management, asset performance monitoring, and a range of market connectivity applications.
To find out more about Kiwi Power’s market leading DER VPP solution and how you can work with us at the forefront of the global energy revolution, please contact us at info@kiwipowered.com
A powerful second chance at life: From commercial vehicle usage to powering battery recycling in Belgium.
North east based Connected Energy is celebrating after the commissioning of its largest second-life battery energy storage system to date. The system has now been handed over to London headquartered Kiwi Power, to operate and optimise in real-time.
The E-STOR system, installed at the Umicore industrial site in Belgium, uses Renault batteries which previously powered Kangoo vehicles in France. Their second life as part of a static energy storage solution is expected to give another seven years when the value of the embedded natural resources can be utilised.
Connected Energy and Groupe Renault signed a deal in 2016 to collaborate on second-life battery energy storage technology.
“The collaboration with Connected Energy, which has been ongoing for three years is the beginning of a great story. Indeed, all customers confirm that our second-life batteries are very appropriate for these energy storage applications. It shows the relevancy of all the efforts done by Groupe Renault and its partners to transform the market for the next years.” explains Amaury Gailliez, Batteries Operation & Business Director, Groupe Renault.
The batteries in the E-STOR have a combined energy storage capacity of 720 kWh and can deliver 1.2MW in power. The Belgian system provides revenue generation and power quality management for global materials technology and recycling group Umicore who also recycle EV batteries.
Connected Energy specialises in developing award-winning energy storage solutions that use electric vehicle batteries which have ended their traditional first life.
The Umicore E-STOR system is developed to provide firm frequency response. “The world’s moving away from a centralised energy model with large carbon intense generation like coal power plants,”explained Matthew Lumsden, Connected Energy CEO. “Instead we’re seeing a distributed renewables energy setup, with many renewable energy sites across countries as opposed to fewer, larger facilities. These renewable energy sources have their own volatilities that impact on grid frequency – a problem energy storage can help solve.”
The grid needs to stay at a consistent level of 50Hz in order to maintain stability; if more energy is created then the demand needs to increase. Conversely if less is generated then the load on the network needs to be reduced. “Our new firm frequency response E-STOR systems work with grid operators, via third party aggregators, to balance energy usage,” said Matthew. “This provides a stable solution for grid operators and customers alike. The grid achieves greater stability, customers enjoy improved power quality and we achieve this without any additional environmental impact from new battery production.”
If you’re working on a similar project, or want to find our more, get in touch with the Kiwi Team.