Understanding how Smart Grids work
Combining the intelligence of multiple energy technologies onsite can help your business introduce an energy strategy that provides significant financial and carbon savings, whilst also creating independence from the grid.
The Smart Grid technology can allow your company to take advantage of the cheap cost of overnight energy to charge up your renewable energy facilities such as electric vehicles and batteries. This allows the stored energy to be used throughout the day to power your site’s operational activities saving you money.
The onsite panels will also begin generating energy throughout the day to fuel the site’s operations and any excess being used to charge the battery so it’s available later in the day. The use of the battery allows your site to avoid being charged for peak imports from the grid between 5pm – 7pm, delivering savings on energy bills.
With sub-second response times, batteries offer a valuable service to the National Grid, who must balance the transmission network by ‘supplying’ power or ‘absorbing’ excess power to/from the grid when needed. The National Grid pays the site for this service.
This is why understanding how Smart Grids work is important to your business.
What is the benefit to my business?
Need For Increased Accuracy
A Smart Grid can allow your business to take HV electricity and then step down the voltage through transformers, before then distributing around the site. The benefit of this is that each unit on site can have their own dedicated meter, owned and monitored by you, which can provide half hourly records of consumption that can be monitored for data analysis.
More Reliable
The decision to install a Smart Grid can allow your company to become less dependent on the national electricity grid. This prevents your site’s operations from being disrupted from variation in power quality or power outages which could potentially cause you to lose money in productivity. What’s more, a smart grid system can also help your business identify where an issue is located in the electrical circuit, allowing it to be addressed with minimal disruption.
Visibility Within The System
The use of a Smart Grid system improves visibility across the site as a whole. With the use of a user interface, your business is able to see how much power is being generated and then supplied to the site along with the amount of energy that is stored in the battery. This will provide more accurate data on achieving a carbon neutral status, therefore ensuring that you’re staying in line with the government’s environmental recommendations.
Can smart grids work with all technologies?
The Smart Grid acts as a central communication hub between all of our technologies that we offer. The power that is generated from the solar panels can be used to power multiple electric vehicle chargers or to top up the battery energy storage system, all of which can be easily observed live via a user-friendly monitoring software.
The smart grid uses a bespoke software to collect energy data from the different technologies located on the site, including the energy generated and the usage and the carbon which is offset. This is displayed on a user-friendly dashboard on a screen for operators to monitor on a day to day basis, allowing for more transparency and closer monitoring of the different site’s energy output.
Why Choose EvoEnergy for Your Smart Grid Technology?
We are the market leaders in smart grid solutions for businesses. Having worked with a variety of different businesses – from public sector organisations to the hospitality and leisure industry – our team is well placed to design a bespoke solution that meets your company’s needs.
Take a look at our smart grid technology case studies to learn more about how we’ve helped businesses like yours to achieve their sustainable energy goals.