Utility Week

12 www.utilityweek.co.uk/fLeX P R O S U M E R S RYAN GILL Chief executive, Social Energy Social Energy will put consumers at the heart of the energy system by providing the technology to turn their homes into a virtual power station, and a platform on which the energy can be traded, according to Ryan Gill, chief executive of Social Energy. e firm's platform has won a contract with National Grid to provide FFR services. Its customers so far are mainly those who already have PV panels on their roof, and are keen to maximise their value, Gill explains. ey can buy energy storage products from manufacturers Social Energy works with, such as Duracell Home Energy Storage, and a hub containing meters that measure the frequency in the house and artificial intelligence (AI) software. is uses machine learning to predict home energy usage patterns, allowing customers to use their own reserves first before taking from the grid. e hub also connects customers to cloud storage, where functions to generate the savings are carried out, which are then passed on to the customers. It effectively creates a residential virtual power platform (VPP), Gill explains. "We have the ability to sell the energy generated to the utility, and give householders access to all the markets, such as ancillary services, or balancing, or saving through time of use. Once we generate those savings, we pass them on to the customer via a credit on their bill, and that reduces their energy by up to 70 per cent," he explains. To gain accreditation to provide FFR services, Social Energy had to provide 11.2 billion datapoints from real- life solar and battery storage connected via its software. "Frequency markets are essentially balancing markets – within the battery, you have to store and dispatch or absorb power to keep the grid on the balance it requires. Every tenth of a second we measured the frequency in homes via the meter, then we passed that data on to illustrate that we could carry out that service within a residential property," he says. Gill reports that the equipment is being installed at a rate of around ten a day. Nationwide, the firm expects to have 4,000 homes a quarter installed by the third quarter of 2019. e only technology constraint at the moment is that customers will need a second-generation smart meter to access some of the revenue streams. Rollout of these is currently held up by industry-wide software delays. // We have the ability to sell the energy generated to the utility, and give householders access to all the markets, such as ancillary services, or balancing, or saving through time of use // Artificial intelligence software uses machine learning to predict home energy usage patterns E N E R G Y T E C H N O L O G Y E N T R E P R E N E U R S

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