Pilot sites
The STREAM pilot sites were chosen carefully to present the diversity in geographical, economic, size and type of the consumers. All the pilots focus on a specific part of STREAM Ecosystem but complement each other to form a comprehensive testing ground of all the elements of STREAM Ecosystem.
The Finnish pilot prototypes innovative mechanisms for incentive-driven flexible usage of active power to help stabilizing and optimising the grid.
This prototype studies the possibility to use a pre-defined part of the load used for heating or cooling buildings as a Frequency Containment Reserve (FCR) and includes building a simulated interface with Fingrid, the Finnish TSO.
FCRs are active power reserves that are automatically controlled based on the grid’s frequency deviation. Their purpose is to contain the frequency variations during normal operation and during disturbances. A decrease in grid’s frequency will cause a decrease in load while an increase in grid’s’ frequency will cause an increase in load.
The pilot sites are 6 residential buildings and 3 buildings that are part of a holiday resort. All together they have 141 kW of controllable load consisting in electric radiators, floor heating, heat pumps, hot water boilers and EV charging units.
In Finland, heating of spaces consists of 27% of the total energy consumption and 63% of the energy consumption in households. Therefore, it is a promising source of flexibility.
The pilot includes also a study about the potential of distributed flexibility on forthcoming DSO level flexibility markets.
OptiWatti offers smart energy management solutions which allow cutting up to 40% of the energy consumption used for heating. Electric radiators, floor heating, water-based heating systems, heat pumps, water boilers, car heaters and EVs charging can be integrated in the same control system.
The solution includes control of solar panels and support for implicit flexibility, that is, adapting automatically energy consumption to the energy hourly price.
Each room can be controlled separately and the wished temperature can be programmed with an hour granularity. This allows also increasing comfort.
Currently, Optiwatti control overall 30 MW in about 2500 buildings.
VTT performs cross-cutting research on future smart energy systems, with a specific focus on aggregated flexibility assets and their potential for different services on markets and on DSO level. In the Finnish pilot VTT conducts modelling and simulations to support the pilot activities. VTT also conducts user-level research through pilot group workshops and interviews
STREAM project kick-off
Definitions of pilot site services and research questions
Deployment of the new periodic measurement database and the new data visualization layer starts
Fine tuning of the project focus
Final versions of services, use cases, requirements and KPIs
Cooperation with Fingrid, the Finnish TSO, is kicked off in a meeting
First customer workshop with the new pilot customers
Risk analysis created
Detailed design of the sFLEX starts
Implementation of Flex server and Flex client parts of sFLEX starts
Detailed design of the sDATA starts
A data warehouse for exchanging data among Finnish partners is created
The study about flexibility services for DSO starts
The first version of the test cases is created