Businesses across Europe are dealing with rising electricity prices. One way out of the crisis may be flexibility aggregation offered by the Czech Nano Energies, which smartly manages electricity consumption and production while also helping reduce energy costs by 10-30%. It also strengthens the stability of the energy grid and optimizes the variability of renewable energy. The company has 130 highly skilled employees, and Hungary is now the fourth country where it is present.
Energy systems are undergoing significant technological change worldwide, but rising prices are also a major challenge for businesses and households alike. This has highlighted what is known as energy flexibility. In other words, energy flexibility is the continuous management of consumption and production of energy assets. As electricity cannot be stored in large quantities and in a cost-effective way, the control of smaller devices is an efficient solution for the stability of the energy supply. As an independent flexibility aggregator, Nano Energies combines numerous smaller and larger power generators and consumers into a centrally managed smart system, which acts as one large “virtual power plant”.
Flexibility aggregators are becoming increasingly important as renewable energy production grows. As renewable generation is not balanced over time, solutions to stabilize the electric grid are crucially needed.
“Feeding the electricity generated by solar panels to the grid has become a hot topic in Hungary in recent months, which shows how important it is to keep the balance of the transmission grid. With its grid balancing services, Nano Energies’ technology can offer a solution to this problem,” says Tibor Lukács, Head of Nano Energies Hungary, who also points out that in addition to the increased stability, the flexibility aggregator can also optimize costs. With Nano Energies’ intelligent solutions, companies – for example, biogas stations, cogeneration units, and landfill gas power plants, to name a few – can achieve energy cost reductions of 10-30 percent without having to transform their daily operations. For companies that operate 24 hours a day and have variable energy consumption, cost savings can be as high as 60 percent.
“Flexibility aggregators are accelerating the transition to sustainable energy. Nano Energies can harness the potential of electricity that would otherwise remain untapped. We adjust consumption and generation so that customers generate electricity when it is most expensive and consume it when it is cheapest. The customer does not even notice this during operation because everything is done automatically, and at the same time, it contributes to the stabilization of the grid without the need to increase the dependence on gas power plants,” explains Nano Energies CEO Stanislav Chvála.
Nano Energies is currently working together with the national grid operator MAVIR Zrt. to meet all its requirements and to be able to start providing balancing services as of next year. Later on, the company plans to launch a more sophisticated and automated (aFRR) flexibility aggregation service as well to allow customers to get extra revenue.
Nano Energies was founded in 2008 by Czech entrepreneur Petr Rokůsek in the Czech Republic. Last year, the company reported a sales revenue of €116 million and currently employs 130 highly skilled professionals – IT specialists and developers, mathematicians, and renewable energy experts.
