Solving a future energy challenge today

Founded in 2015, Solo Energy’s disruptive business model offers free battery storage and Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) charger installations in homes and businesses across the grid.

With these flexibility assets centrally controlled by the innovative FlexiGrid aggregation platform that Solo has developed, the company’s goal is to lower energy bills for consumers and help make the transition to 100% renewables.

After several successful and ongoing demonstrator projects in the UK & Ireland, Solo’s largest trial to date is now underway in Orkney, Scotland, forming part of the UK government-funded ReFLEX scheme.

In the below Q&A, Solo co-founder Killian O’Connor talks about the ReFLEX project, Solo’s trailblazing business model, and his vision for the future of energy.

Hi Killian. Can you tell us about the unique situation in Orkney, and how this served as an inspiration to set up Solo Energy?

Orkney is unique in a lot of ways, but specifically because it has a renewable energy penetration of around 110%, mostly wind generation. This means that the islands are – in theory – fully powered by renewables. They even have enough excess wind generation to export to mainland Scotland.

This is great, but there’s a slight hitch. On very windy days, the interconnector – which transports renewable power to the grid – can’t handle all of the export, meaning the turbines have to be curtailed and this results in a huge waste of energy. Furthermore, on calm days in Orkney when the wind is not blowing, they must import coal and nuclear to keep the islands powered, despite having more than 100% net renewable penetration.

Having battery storage technology in Orkney would change all of this, because it means renewable energy could be kept in reserve for those calm days, and it would also provide the ability to store excess energy on windy days, so none goes to waste. With the right infrastructure put in place, Orkney could be completely self-sufficient – and that’s provided the inspiration for setting up Solo Energy.

Though my background is in the wind energy sector, I met Solo’s co-founder Mark Hamilton – who is also from Cork – when we briefly worked together in the tidal energy sector in Orkney. We knew that the renewables industry could (and should) be doing more with storage (we have some of the same problems with wind curtailment here in Ireland), and that’s when we had the idea to start up Solo.

Essentially, what we see in Orkney with ReFLEX is the opportunity to solve a future energy challenge today. What is happening in Orkney now – in terms of its very high penetration of renewable energy – is what island systems like Britain and Ireland will look like and need to prepare for in 20 years’ time. You’ve got a situation where you have all this renewable generation, but you don’t have the means to store it or balance it. That’s the future challenge we’re reactively trying to solve now in Orkney, and then once we’ve demonstrated it, pre-emptively start putting our solution in place across the wider grid.

You’ve explained a little bit about how battery storage can provide a solution for renewable energy generation. How does this apply to the innovative model that Solo Energy has now developed and that will be demonstrated in Orkney under Project ReFLEX?

Looking back to 2015, the year we started up Solo, a lot started happening in the UK in terms of grid-scale battery storage. There were a lot of interesting tenders from the government at that time for Enhanced Frequency Response – which were four-year contracts for large, containerised battery storage systems that could provide frequency services to the grid. However, we saw a different vision for battery storage in terms of its potential.

We were more interested in how we could use smaller ‘behind-the-meter’ batteries installed in residential and commercial properties to act as a buffer at the point of consumption, rather than the use of large batteries installed on the grid. By installing these behind-the-meter batteries, it gives you the ability to control demand in order to meet supply by charging and discharging the battery at the right times. For instance, with more renewables coming on the grid, you want to be able to charge the battery when the wind is blowing or when the sun is shining, allowing you to use the energy whenever you need it.

So that was one part of our vision. The other key part was finding a viable way of rolling out these batteries en masse [as you really need the collective use of batteries on a network to provide an effective solution for integrating renewables]. Though on-the-wall batteries have been around for a few years now, they are still relatively expensive, meaning only a certain amount of people can afford them. We don’t think this should be the case. We think everyone should have the opportunity to own batteries and solar panels. So, from day one, our business model has been to factor in a financing element, whereby the end customer doesn’t have to pay any money up front. Instead, they essentially host our infrastructure and we operate that infrastructure in order to deliver value to them, but also to energy suppliers and grid operators as well.

In a nutshell, the incentive for the consumer to host our battery is that we will enable the delivery of cheaper, renewable energy to them via their electricity supplier. Secondly, through our model, we can also reduce the cost for suppliers to deliver that electricity to their customers and increase their margins by buying cheaper electricity off the wholesale market at the right time of day. Lastly, we can ultimately deliver the benefits back to the grid through delivering frequency, voltage, and demand-side response services – all which help manage and balance demand on the grid and further facilitate the transition of the energy system to renewables.

While this explains some of the benefits of our model, it also helps explain some of the revenue streams of our business. All of the services we deliver at Solo are about the charging or discharging the batteries at the right time, either to deliver a grid service or to take advantage of a price signal.

Can you elaborate on what the offer is to the end-consumer and how you are partnering with energy suppliers and local generators to deliver this?

The offer to the homeowner or businessowner will be that in return for hosting our battery system on their wall, we’ll give them a fixed low-cost, local renewable tariff. We deliver this tariff in conjunction with our energy supplier partners.

Keeping energy local is central to this idea, as the intention is to procure energy from local wind and solar microgeneration and larger wind turbines on the island. So, the tariff will be structured with these local sources at the heart of if – which is also really important to getting the community on board with the project.

The other important part of this service is that we manage the battery system and everything that goes on behind it. That way, customers don’t have to change how they use their energy – they keep doing that they’re doing. This is significant because getting consumers to change their behaviour is a huge challenge. We want to take that dilemma of behavioural change away from people and offer energy purely as a service. By this we mean an offering similar to your phone plan, for example, where you have an all-you-can-eat service without worrying about when you use your data. We think energy should be the same, whereby you have a fixed monthly fee for your energy and somebody behind the scenes looks after all the behavioural change. Essentially, we’ll do all the work, we’ll get you low-carbon renewable energy into your home at a lower cost than you’re already paying, and you don’t have to do anything except have a battery installed on your wall. Simple as that – and this is precisely what we’re testing now in Orkney.

Wow! It sounds like an amazing concept. Can you tell us more about the important role that smart meters play in Solo’s business model, and how Solo’s FlexiGrid platform will leverage and compliment other new technologies on the grid to help deliver our future energy system.

Put simply, our business model doesn’t work without smart meters. We need half-hourly settlement on the market – which smart meters provide – to allow us to take advantage of the right price points. Having access to this settlement data reconciles when we purchase energy and allows us to know when renewables are generating on the grid. We need every home to be fitted with a smart meter in order to offer our energy service.

When it comes to delivering our future energy system – one that is cleaner, smarter and more flexible – there are really two elements to it. There’s the hardware side – which means installing smart meters, renewable energy assets and other low-carbon technologies like batteries – and then there’s the software side. FlexiGrid is the name of our software solution that essentially ties those things together and which will not only help deliver the future of energy, but also manage it smartly. That’s where we see ourselves coming in. And that means not just benefitting the system in terms of decarbonising, but also benefitting the end consumer in terms of delivering more affordable energy.

Source: Solo Energy