Intelligent control systems for commercial energy

It decides which energy asset acts and when, re-deciding every 0.1 seconds against price, network and site signals. It forecasts load, generation and pricing, optimises across competing value streams, and dispatches generation, storage and flexible load accordingly.

Because wholesale prices settle every five minutes and a demand peak can be set in a single interval. Decisions made on an hourly cycle miss both. Sub-second dispatch is also what makes FCAS participation possible.

Usually yes. Existing assets are generally kept and brought under control rather than replaced, the assessment establishes what the installed hardware can be instructed to do.

A virtual power plant is a fleet of separately owned energy assets — batteries, solar systems and flexible loads across many sites — coordinated so they can be dispatched together as if they were a single generator. For a commercial site, participating means the on-site battery responds to market signals alongside others, earning from capacity it was not otherwise using. What makes it possible is the control layer, not the hardware.

FCAS stands for Frequency Control Ancillary Services: the markets that keep the grid at fifty hertz by paying assets to inject or absorb power within seconds. A commercial battery can earn from FCAS, and it is one of the five value streams, but only if it is registered and its control system can respond fast enough. Most commercial batteries are never registered, so the revenue is left uncaptured.

Distributed energy resources are generation, storage and controllable load connected at the customer end of the network rather than at a power station — rooftop solar, batteries, EV chargers and flexible plant. A DERMS, or distributed energy resource management system, is the software that coordinates them. On a single commercial site that means one control layer deciding which asset acts in each interval, rather than four systems each optimising alone.

Behind the meter means on the customer side of the electricity meter — equipment you own, generating or storing energy that serves your own load before it touches the grid. Energy used behind the meter displaces electricity at the retail rate rather than earning the much lower export rate, which is why self-consumption is usually worth more than export. It is also the boundary that separates what you control from what the network does.