Utility Week

38 | JANUARY 2021 | UTILITY WEEK Operational Excellence Interview Minute-by-minute flexibility Tom Grimwood talks to Conor Maher-McWilliams, head of flexibility at Ovo's smart tech arm Kaluza, about the company's direct-to-car smart charging trial with Bosch. T owards the end of October, Kaluza – Ovo Energy's smart technology arm – and Bosch announced they had suc- cessfully used a digital platform to remotely control the charging of an electric vehicle. The partners claimed this new direct control capability would allow smart charg- ing to spread faster and more widely by reducing its dependence on separate smart charging hardware and avoiding issues over compatibility. Connor Maher-McWilliams, head of flex- ibility at Kaluza, says the trial with Bosch (which supplies charging equipment to car- makers around the world) is "really breaking new ground in direct-to-EV controls". "In electric vehicle smart charging, there's a number of different ways you can deliver the key services – you can either talk to the chargepoint or you can talk to the vehicle itself – and there are different ben- efits and trade-offs," he says. In the case of home charging, Maher- McWilliams says directly controlling either the vehicle or a smart charger has the benefit of bypassing smart meters, and with it their limitations. "That's not to say the smart meter doesn't have a role in domestic flexibility, but when- ever we look at the spec of the smart meter and the frequency at which we can retrieve data from it, and also the level of control we have from a smart meter, our devices already outperform what we can do via smart meters. "The fastest way to deliver the most inno- vative product is not through the smart meter as we see it but rather through direct integra- tion with devices like chargepoints." He says the solution trialled by Kaluza and Bosch allows them to receive updates on a minute-by-minute basis. "For example, if it's a vehicle-to-grid chargepoint, we get the latest charging or discharging power, we get the state of charge and the battery health… That means every minute we can reassess whether the charg- ing decision we're making right now is the right one or should we change the state of the charging." He continues: "The imbalance price is a super-dynamic price signal that can move quickly depending on if there's short-term power station trip. Having that minute-by- minute access to data allows us to respond very quickly to the latest market opportunity and also provide very quick support to the grid if necessary." The networks Kaluza has also been busy this year working with Western Power Distribution (WPD) on its Intraflex project. "They teamed up with Nodes to do more closer to real-time flexibility," says Maher- McWilliams, "and in that market, we've used a mixed portfolio of in-home batteries, uni- directional EV smart chargers and bidirec- tional vehicle-to-grid chargepoints. "If they need flexibility, we can respond on demand and deliver that response within a few seconds for the majority of the portfo- lio," he adds. "If you start to think about scaling up the potential for flexibility, having that quick responsiveness means you can compete with and outperform the majority of assets pro- viding flexibility services." He says most DNOs, though "not all of them", have been keen to work closely with companies like Kaluza to gain a better under- standing of their needs and concerns, and cites WPD and UK Power Networks as being among the more "forward thinking". WPD, for instance, has set up its markets in a way that allows the registration of assets to be more heavily automated: "For some of the other DNOs, the processes are a bit more manual. We're not going into markets where there's a lot of manual overhead because the benefit just isn't there for us." "If you think about the electrification of transport, you've got two huge, somewhat traditional industries going through big transformations and I think they really need to come together in the middle to drive the full benefits," he remarks. "We need to see more people stepping outside their traditional roles and embracing the opportunities this new world creates." Decarbonisation of heat This new world is also expected to see domestic heating create even larger require- ments for – and be a source of – flexibility. Speaking to Utility Week prior to the announcement of a new target to install 600,000 heat pumps a year by 2028, Maher- McWilliams says: "We really need to be serious about how we're going to decarbon- ise heat and get off gas boilers. People talk about hydrogen but I think we can't delay cracking on with the technologies that exist and work today. "Heat is definitely an area we spend a lot of time thinking about and are preparing for that scale to li› off." Maher-McWilliams says Kaluza has been experimenting with heat pumps as part of a number of innovation programmes: "We're really trying to get into what is the flexibil- ity available from a heat pump. How do you manage those heat pumps to keep the cus- tomer's comfort level the same but while pulling out as much flexibility as you can?" He says making smart EV charging com- pelling means offering the technology in a way that is simple and intuitive. Their current product allows customers to see information on the state of charge and set how much they want their vehicle to be charged and by when. The platform then Conor Maher-McWilliams, Kaluza,

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