AmonRa Energy’s development balances the storage and management of the energy flow in the enterprise against its own needs and the exchange
The future is renewable energy, but in combination with other more efficient energy capacities, believes Eng. Ivan Velchev. He has been the Director of Business Development at AmonRa Energy AD since its inception in 2020. With the introduction of renewable energy, a transition to new energy systems is taking place. The process is dynamic and the problems with balancing energy systems, which is a key component for ensuring the stability and reliability of the systems themselves, come to the fore. Energy production from RES must be synchronized with other sources in real time, and in markets with large price fluctuations and price imbalances. The solution to these problems is the installation of energy storage systems.
What and how
The integration of a large battery resource and its synchronization with the grid is done through software algorithms with artificial intelligence and machine learning. All this constitutes the so-called virtual battery, which is practically a cloud service for managing and distributing energy resources. It is a platform for sharing capacity and operating with this capacity as needed and is essentially a virtual power plant that integrates a physical battery resource.
Service
There are batteries installed at end users, such as enterprises and small photovoltaic parks. The virtual battery is an additional service to increase the capacity and return on investment in physical batteries that have a certain number of life cycles. The virtual battery increases the number of cycles many times (between 3 and 7 times), but also the sharing of needs in different time ranges.
Connectivity
Investments in batteries are still in their early stages in Bulgaria – so far the capacity is around 20 MWh, and this year the capacity will at least triple. In order to function within the structure of the virtual software that “orchestrates” them, the physical batteries must support the same protocol so that the batteries can connect to the cloud.
Know-how
AmonRa Energy is a supplier and integrator of high-cycle energy storage batteries (over 12,000). Seeing the growing need for such a service, they looked for a way to create it to improve the return on investment for the end user. There is no such experience in the country, so they are in the process of acquiring a small German software company with know-how. AmonRa Energy has large battery supply projects in Greece and Macedonia. The good news is that research is already underway to recycle batteries, and through their “smart” management, their life cycle is significantly increased.
Development continues
The Virtual Batteries development is an upgrade over physical batteries and its improvement continues. The more batteries there are in the physical group, the more necessary this software development becomes. For example, it monitors the enterprise’s own needs and keeps in touch with the exchange, determines what and when to share with the market, implementing efficient energy distribution and balancing the storage and management of the energy flow in the enterprise with the exchange. The integration of physical batteries with the virtual cluster increases the effect and benefits many times over. The results are being monitored by a large multinational investor, who are following the project with interest and it is expected that concrete actions will be taken soon.
