Staying ahead of the technology curve means strengthening your competitive advantage. That is why we give you data-driven innovation insights into the energy industry. This time, you get to discover 5 hand-picked startups developing grid balancing solutions.
Global Startup Heat Map highlights 5 Top Grid Balancing Solutions out of 381
The insights of this data-driven analysis are derived from the Big Data & Artificial Intelligence-powered StartUs Insights Discovery Platform, covering 2.093.000+ startups & scaleups globally. The platform gives you an exhaustive overview of emerging technologies & relevant startups within a specific field in just a few clicks.
The Global Startup Heat Map below reveals the distribution of the 381 exemplary startups & scaleups we analyzed for this research. Further, it highlights 5 energy startups that we hand-picked based on criteria such as founding year, location, funding raised, and more. You get to explore the solutions of these 5 startups & scaleups in this report. For insights on the other376 grid balancing solutions, get in touch.
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Spectral offers an Energy Trading Solution
As a shift from fossil fuel-driven centralized energy networks to renewable energy-based decentralized networks takes place, electricity consumers are looking for platforms to exchange energy without the involvement of a middleman. Additionally, consumers also want to know where their energy is sourced from. To address this shift, startups are looking into blockchain-based solutions.
Dutch startup Spectral offers an energy exchange platform for individuals, businesses, and communities to participate in the energy market. SPEX, its blockchain-based platform, allows for automated negotiation and settlement of energy and flexible trading. The platform is integrable with existing smart-metering infrastructure. It provides users with real-time energy visualizations and billing via advanced algorithms that optimize trading strategies based on user preferences. With decentralized energy networks in motion, SPEX allows participants to choose their energy based on how it is managed and sourced.
Shifted Energy balances Heating with Grid Needs
With more and more appliances being adopted, grids face heavy fluctuations. These fluctuations quite often lead to power cuts and shortages. To mitigate extreme stress on the grid and to ensure an uninterrupted power supply for energy consumers, startups are developing solutions to synchronize appliance’s electricity consumption with the grid.
US-based startup Shifted Energy’s Grid Maestro, a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform, monitors, analyzes, and optimizes smart water heaters. By installing a Shifted Energy Tempo or another smart controller, Grid Maestro monitors the heater’s energy consumption patterns. Then, based on this the system’s advanced machine learning algorithms, generates accurate forecasts of future consumption. Grid Maestro further analyzes these forecasts to estimate how much electricity consumption can be shifted from one time to another without impacting access to hot water. This helps grid operators balance intermittent renewables via electric water heater control systems which level heating with grid needs.
Intellicharge supports Grid Balance by optimizing Electric Vehicle (EV) Charging Schedules
With electrification gaining traction, more and more people are adopting electric vehicles. This also leads to increased demand for EV charging, ultimately increasing pressures on the electricity grid. To optimize EVs’ charging needs and ensure grid balancing, startups are looking into solutions that synchronize demand peaks with EV charging requirements.
UK-based startup Intellicharge is a software application provider supporting electric vehicle owners to charge their cars. The application recommends the users the most affordable and greenest electricity options with suitable timing for charging the vehicle. This helps electricity grids to stay balanced. Further, the app provides a granular time of use of tariffs, where energy prices can vary for each half-hourly period. By charging the vehicle when electricity is the greenest and the most economical, users help electricity grids even out demand peaks and troughs, thus ensuring grid balance.
Packetized Energy enables Real-Time Energy Flexibility
Energy storage and management in real-time have to be dynamic and more connected. With an array of distributed energy devices in use, a flexible energy system enables the grid to balance energy efficiently. Interconnection of the devices further advances this approach by creating a smart network. To this end, startups are developing solutions to make the grid more flexible via connected devices.
Packetized Energy provides solutions for real-time flexibility of distributed energy resources (DERs). The energy is divided into small chunks (i.e., packetization) and these chunks are spread in time (i.e., randomization) thus enabling electricity demand to flexibly follow supply in real-time. The startup’s cloud-based Nimble platform converts residential and small-commercial distributed energy devices into flexible energy resources or virtual batteries. With real-time flexible energy, these connected virtual batteries can moderate grid and market services like frequency regulation, price arbitrage, grid management, and renewable power smoothing. In addition, grid balancing usually keeps electricity costs low for utilities and consumers. This ensures that the grid runs reliably on clean energy.
Virtual Peaker enables Electric Utilities to Balance the Grid
With the rapid shift towards renewable energy, there is a need for a clean and inexpensive approach to balance the grid. Electricity consumption data at a more granular level helps to manage the electricity demand efficiently. Therefore startups are developing solutions that can integrate energy utilities with the grid to facilitate balance.
Virtual Peaker develops a software platform that assists electric utilities in effectively managing the residential electric demand and balancing the grid in a zero-carbon fashion. By applying machine learning and real-time command over internet-enabled appliances, the demand and supply are optimized minimizing the negative impact on the residential customer. Alongside, arbitrage between locational marginal pricing (LMP) and regulated retail rates is achieved which reduces the load on dispatching batteries during peak times and doing the opposite during low-cost times. These savings flatten the load curve and balance the grid while reducing energy costs to utilities and homeowners. The solution is integrable with smart energy devices and enables demand response management at the device level.
Discover more Energy Startups
Energy startups such as the examples highlighted in this report focus on energy storage, blockchain, renewables as well as quantum computing. While all of these technologies play a major role in advancing the energy industry, they only represent the tip of the iceberg. To explore more energy technologies, simply get in touch to let us look into your areas of interest. For a more general overview, you can download our free energy Innovation Report to save your time and improve strategic decision-making.
